I’ve recently heard from a few people over the last year or two that, as link builders, we should only be focusing on links that drive traffic & revenue.

Earlier this week I watched a video posted on Twitter from Wil Reynolds, which you’ll find below. I have huge respect for Wil (interviewed him here in 2012; still worth a read), and in general, I believe that what he says in the community comes ...

I’ve recently heard from a few people over the last year or two that, as link builders, we should only be focusing on links that drive traffic & revenue.

Earlier this week I watched a video posted on Twitter from Wil Reynolds, which you’ll find below. I have huge respect for Wil (interviewed him here in 2012; still worth a read), and in general, I believe that what he says in the community comes from a really good, authentic place.

If you don’t want to watch it, the general gist of it is that most of the links SEOs are building “don’t do anything for the client”, given that these links do not drive conversions, assisted conversions, newsletter sign ups, etc. He’s one of many people that have talked about links in this way, and by no means am I trying to / want to single him out (he’s just the most vocal / widespread of the bunch).

This idea sounds great in theory, and can get you pretty pumped up. A few other similarly exhilarating mottos come to mind when I hear it (heard throughout the community):

“Fire your clients! If you don’t like them, then stop dealing with them.”

“Build a website for users, not search engines!”

“Just create great content, and the links will come!”

The problem is that we can sometimes swing too far in one direction, whether it’s all the way to the left (i.e. black hat SEO), or all the way to the right (i.e. building a site purely for UX). That can lead to extremes like getting penalties from search engines on one side, and building non-indexable sites on the other.

In this case, the idea of only going after revenue driving links, and not any others, is a perfect example of swinging too far in one direction.

1. Doing something that doesn’t directly lead to revenue

Let’s take the logic of this argument and apply it to other parts of SEO. Read through this and tell me that, apart from a few specifics (i.e. page speed improvements), that any of these improvements lead directly to increased revenue.

We also know that Google loves original content, and that there are many listing-type pages that SEOs create content for that we can safely assume few are going to read. Maybe those product description sweat shops are writing content that people will make purchasing decisions based off of, but there’s a good chance very few people are.

So: it’s OK that every activity we’re doing as marketers doesn’t directly result in driving revenue. That’s a lot of what we do as SEOs, anyway.

2. Links that may or not make an impact on rankings

Wil talked about the concern that the links acquired in a campaign might not have the impact that one hopes to have after the campaign is over.

You could easily make the case that, for anything technical SEO-wise, it’s not a sure thing that an individual fix will impact rankings. Sometimes you’re in the dark as to what exactly is causing the issue. That’s why audits contain a number of items to address, because any individual item may not be what Google is taking the most issue with. So, for anything you’re doing on-site, it’s a risk on some level that it won’t have the impact you’re looking for.

But how does link building compare to other marketing campaign types that involve outreach / outbound elements (i.e. advertisements, PR, etc.)? Most of those, if not all, don’t involve 100% confidence that you’ll get the result you’re hoping for, whether it’s branding, direct sales, or search rankings.

The expectation that a link building campaign should always result in a clear increase in rankings, especially when dealing with a very complex, modern algorithm that may hinder a site from ranking because of numerous other issues, is a bit unfair.

3. Existing well ranking websites & their link profiles

Now let’s look at example. Take the websites ranking for “San Diego Flowers”. The best ranking site in that city is AllensFlowers.com. They’ve got some solid links that look like they drive a few sales here & there. They also have a few links that are much more controversial in terms of the direct, non-SEO value they provide:

They were given an award from a local event. I think it’s safe to say few people have groomed the list of links on this page & made purchasing decisions based off any of them.

They were listed in a resource guide for planning a wedding. If this page got a lot traffic from qualified potential customers (people planning a wedding), then for sure, I could see this link driving revenue. But according to OSE, this page only has 2 internal links, and I didn’t find it ranking well for “san diego wedding resources”, so I doubt more than a handful of people see the page each month, let alone click on that particular link to Allen’s Flowers.

They were cited as an example of using a particular technology. I think it’s safe to say that no sales were driven here (who shops for florists that use mSQL?), and although it’s not niche or location related, it’s still a link from a very aged, DA50+ website.

Do some of these link examples pass traffic/conversions? Maybe; there’s no way of knowing for sure either way. But the point is: these are links I’d want, and whether or not they passed conversions or traffic, they’re legitimate links that pass the eye test & help this flower shop dominate for all of its main keywords. And that end result is worth going out of my way to make sure our link is included on an awards page, or that a local magazine’s resource guide includes their service with the others in the area.

4. My own experiences

Through the clients we’ve had and the projects I’ve been a part of, one of my favorite things to look at in analytics is the referral traffic of the sites we’re building links to. I want to see if some of the links we get are sending any traffic, and if they do, if that traffic converts.

One example that comes to mind is a .gov link project we did for a real estate site. Earlier in 2016, we built ~30 links over the course of 6-9 months (quite a small campaign), and we watched their organic traffic grow ~50% over that time period.

Looking at analytics, since the links were acquired, only 3 of the 30 have sent more than 10 visits. A couple of them did send traffic that met conversion goals! But that wasn’t going to make or break why we did the campaign in the first place.

I remember getting a blogroll link a few years back that sent some serious traffic (mid 4 figures a month), which was awesome. But if I spent time only going after links that would send traffic & conversions, I would’ve built significantly less links, and drove significantly less rankings for my clients & my own sites (which, coincidentally, results in less revenue).

So what’s the takeaway?

I totally understand why a lot people want to communicate this message. The short answer is that you attract bigger & better clients when you say things like this. As someone who writes more as a practitioner, and less as a thought leader, it’s clear that what I’m doing isn’t the best lead generation strategy for an agency (for everyone 1 big budget client that contacts us, we get 50 small business owners unreasonably looking to spend $200/month for great work).

With that said, I think it’s important to understand the meaning of the message, while still keeping things practical. Here’s how we can do it.

1. Check referral sources for opportunities

Scan referral traffic in your analytics for patterns & clues to more traffic/revenue driving opportunities. This counts for both new links you’re building, but also for all past manually OR naturally acquired ones.

If you see one or two links that are sending value, ask yourself “are there other link opportunities out there just like this?” For our agency, we usually come up with a tactic that, at its core, is a single way to get a link, but can be applied to 1000s of sites. You may have just stumbled into something where there are many other opportunities just like it.

For example – imagine an eCommerce niche electronics store finding a link from a local robotics club’s New Member Info page to the store’s Arduino starter kit product page. There are probably 100s of other local robotics club that have website information for new members (and are likely to have interest in that starter kit), so reaching out to each with a discount code for that product could scale really well, and drive a lot of revenue (make sure they mention the discount code at the next club meeting, too!).

2. If you do find a revenue-generating link tactic, treat it like the golden egg that it is

If you do come across one, invest in it to do it right if it can end up paying for itself.

Two general ones that come to mind are press coverage & forum link building. If you’ve got a cool product, paying a PR professional to get you coverage could result in direct sales. If you’re in a niche that has active & passionate communities in forums, invest in becoming a part of them, and understand how you can post links in a way that’s allowed.

So – what do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Note: if you just want to skip to my conclusions, you can find them here.

Recently, I had a bit of a breakthrough.

As we’ve expanded the agency, I was finally able to use our internal resources to build out & rank our own projects. I’ve always had the mindset of “drinking our own Koolaid”, and as we’ve gone down this path, I recently stumbled into a rabbit hole ...

Note: if you just want to skip to my conclusions, you can find them here.

Recently, I had a bit of a breakthrough.

As we’ve expanded the agency, I was finally able to use our internal resources to build out & rank our own projects. I’ve always had the mindset of “drinking our own Koolaid”, and as we’ve gone down this path, I recently stumbled into a rabbit hole that gave me a huge burst of excitement and an increase in expectations for what we could do in the near future. But it came at a cost: paranoia.

Once the dust settled on the improvements we made, I took a major step back and realized that what we were building was more or less sitting on the fault line of a tectonic plate.

It could all come crashing down in an instant, all because of one critical assumption that I’ve made to date: that links will continue to matter.

I quickly realized that I needed to have a better gauge on the longevity of links beyond the tweets I happened to read that day. I’ve never had much cause for concern over the years regarding this issue (evidence of why is listed later), but if I was going to make a major bet over the next 12-24 months, I needed to know the parameters of what could go wrong, and this was one of the items at the top of the list.

I ended up discussing things over with a few trusted colleagues of mine, as well as reaching out to a few other experts that I trusted the opinion of in regards to the future of SEO. So I wanted to share with you my thinking, and the overall conclusions I’ve drawn based off the information available.

Separating Facts from Opinions

The main source of “facts” that the industry points to as a whole are statements from Google. Yet, there have been numerous instances where what Google is telling us is, at the very least, misleading.

Here are a few recent examples to illustrate in what way they are misleading:

1. In their “Not Provided” announcement post in October 2011, Google stated that “the change will affect only a minority of your traffic.” Not even two years later, Danny Sullivan was told by Google that they had begun work on encrypting ALL searches. The rest is history.

My thoughts: even when we get the truth from Google, it should be labeled with huge, red letters of the date the statement was made, because things can change very, very quickly. In this case, it was probably their intention all along to gradually roll this out to all searches, in order to not anger people too greatly all at once.

2. Google’s John Mueller made this statement a few weeks ago about 302 redirects passing PageRank. It implies that 302 redirects are OK for SEO. As Mike King quickly pointed out on Twitter, that’s very misleading based off most SEO’s prior experiences.

My thoughts: is it difficult to believe that 302 redirects pass at least 0.01% of the PageRank of the page? I don’t think so. So really, this statement isn’t saying much. It’s a non-answer, as it’s framed in comparison to a 404 (no PR passes) instead of a 301 (~90% of PR passes), the direct alternative in this case. So really, it doesn’t answer anything practical.

Take those two examples & realize that things can change quickly, and that you should try to decipher what is actually, concretely being said.

So, with that in mind, here are some recent statements on the topic of this post:

1. March 24, 2016 – Google lists their top 3 ranking factors as: links, content and RankBrain (although they didn’t state the order of the first two; RankBrain is definitely 3rd, though).

My thoughts: this isn’t anything new. This list lines up with what they indicated in the RankBrain initial news article in Bloomberg when they stated RankBrain was #3. All that was left to speculate, until now, was what #1 and #2 were, although it wasn’t too difficult to guess.

2. Feb 2, 2015 – Google confirms that you don’t necessarily need links to rank. John Mueller cites an example of friend of his who launched a local neighborhood website in Zurich as being indexed, ranking, and getting search traffic.

My thoughts: this isn’t very surprising, for two reasons. First, that the queries they’re ranking for are probably very low competition (because: local + international), and because Google has gotten a lot better over the years at looking at other signals in areas where the link graph was lacking.

3. May 5, 2014 – Matt Cutts leads off a video with a disclaimer stating “I think backlinks have many, many years left in them”.

My thoughts: as much of an endorsement as that is, a haunting reminder of how quickly things change is Matt’s comments later in the video talking about authorship markup, a project that was eventually abandoned in the following years.

4. Feb 19, 2014 – Google’s Matt Cutts stated that they tried dropping links altogether from their ranking algorithm, and found it to be “much, much worse”.

My thoughts: interestingly enough, Yandex tried this starting in March 2014 for specific niches, and brought it back a year later after finding it to be unsuccessful. Things change awfully quick, but if there’s any evidence on this list that can add reassurance, the combination of two different search engines trying & failing this is probably best. With that said, our main concern isn’t the complete riddance of links, but rather, its absolute strength as a ranking factor. So, once again, it’s still not all that reassuring.

Opinions of Others

Let’s now transition to the opinions of others in the industry. It could be argued that these can be a much better gauge on the reality of SEO than whatever Google is telling us (and I’d agree!).

The most substantial opinion piece to start off with is Moz’s Bi-Annual Search Ranking Factors study. Half of the study is based around a survey that was given to 150 experts. In the survey, questions were asked about the most important ranking factors, both for today, and for the future. Here are the results of current ranking factors:

And here are the results for predictions of future algorithmic changes (only linked, not embedded, because it’s quite long). For these, note that zero of the “predicted to increase in impact” factors were link-based. Furthermore, the only 2 in the “predicted to decrease in impact” were link-based.

As I mentioned earlier, I decided to touch base with a few specific people in the industry that I place a lot of trust in: AJ Kohn & Justin Briggs. Here’s what their thoughts were when asked about the future of links as a ranking factor:

Links are and will continue to be an important part of SEO for the foreseeable future because they remain a powerful way for Google to measure authority and expertise.

The link graph has been at the heart of Google’s search algorithm from the start. One of the more interesting videos Matt Cutts did related to separating popularity from authority. He makes the point that popular sites might include porn but people don’t often link to porn. On the other hand he says that many government websites aren’t very popular but they do attract a number of links.

In the same video, Cutts also discusses how the anchor text used in those links can help Google to better understand the topic for which it might rank. And there are numerous patents that delve into how much weight to give anchor text and how that might aid in establishing topical relevance.

Now, Google is getting better and better at understanding the meaning of content, but that doesn’t mean that links will suddenly lose value. They might matter slightly less but I generally see these improvements as being synergistic.

But let’s put all of this aside and look at the bigger picture and use some logic. Does Google still police paid links and other manipulative link schemes? Of course they do. And the only reason to do this is because links still matter.

Currently, and within the short-term, links are here to stay (at least in the traditional information retrieval of documents aspect of search, which is shrinking over time). An often undervalued aspect of links, in a very traditional PageRank sense, is that “link equity” is an input for URL discovery, crawl scheduling, crawl budgeting, crawl depth, and likely hundreds of other processes and checks. I see links as the first layer in rank determinations. The net effect is that their “slice of the pie” is getting smaller, but that’s not exactly what’s happening. Results may be put in order based on more traditional ranking processes, then search engines integrate usage data (CTR, bounce, bias), brand affinity, search sessions, query refinement, machine learning, localization, and personalization. The net outcome of these “re-sorts” is that the perceived weight of links goes down, but links are responsible for getting the URLs into the original consideration set for rankings.

The value of links in Universal Search has eroded, because search is about more than retrieving articles. Mobile, voice, entities, structured data, personal search, conversational search, predictive search, and apps have little dependency on links. Some of these technologies never refer to the link graph, with the caveat that many of these rely on the desktop index to run (or at least to “learn”).

When looking at SEO, I’m less concerned about the changing value of links and more focused on the declining importance of traditional, document-based search results in a company’s overall search strategy. However, we think of links in terms of digital PR and promotion. A marketing plan always has room for good promotion.

In it, Will talks about how RankBrain being added to the mix affects the future potential value of links for SEO. I will pull out the most relevant bit:

What this means in practice is that even after whatever change is made to dial up the dependence on RankBrain and dial down the dependence on the human-tweaked algorithm, I believe that we will continue to see link metrics be better correlated to rankings than any other metric we have access to.

In other words, RankBrain will be more important than all the individual signals in the human-tweaked algorithm (including links) but links will remain the dominant signal that RankBrain itself uses.”

My Own Opinions

Let’s take a step back. Have links stopped being an indicator of the quality & relevance of a website? Has a link from TechCrunch or the National Institute of Health stopped being relevant to the assessment of the legitimacy of a website? Has that changed?

I only see two main things that have changed in our understanding of links as a ranking signal:

That some links do a better job than others at indicating the quality & relevance of a website.

That there are things beyond links that can also indicate the quality & relevance of a given website.

Google has done a better job of understanding those two things since they first started. For the first item, that’s why you have Penguin. For the second item, that’s why you hear about things like unlinked brand mentions & social signals.

But the idea that links not being a signal in the future altogether is beyond ludicrous.

It would be discounting the foundation of what the algorithm is built upon. And that’s not important because of historical significance, it’s important because it’s based off how the Web fundamentally works. Links are just connections between things, and some of those connections hold more importance than others. Throwing out links altogether as a ranking signal would be the equivalent of disregarding recommendations from people that you trust.

So really, the argument over link-based factors playing a role versus no role at all, is dumb.

Note: so now that we’ve established this, when I talk about links in the context of the rest of this article, I will be talking about the links that Google WANTS to count, not all links on the Web.

If, so far, we’re on the same page, then the real question is how strong of a ranking factor links will be. There are two main things that will influence this.

The introduction of new factors.

The relative strength of each factor

The first is simplest to explain, so let’s start there.

The Introduction of New Factors

As new ranking factors are added to the algorithm, inevitably, dilution happens. There is only 100 percentage points that make up the entire decision making process behind an algorithm. It’s a limited amount of space. So the introduction of something new, even if it’s tiny, inevitably takes space away from all others.

And if the factor does its job and holds meaning, then that’s good. That means a smaller reliance on any one, single factor. That doesn’t mean just links. That also means things like content-based or user experience-based factors.

The concept of new factors being introduced into the algorithm represents an unknown. And I could never claim to have an accurate pulse on new things altogether that Google might be introducing into their ranking algorithm.

The Relative Strength of Each Factor

Note: I will usually be using the phrase “the concept of RankBrain” instead of simply the term “RankBrain”. This is because I only know that it’s using machine learning, and will describe it from the standpoint of what machine learning models do, in order to extinguish any confusion about me having any real idea of what RankBrain is & does, which I don’t, because not much is publicly known.

People are talking a lot about the concept of RankBrain, and for very good reason. It, without much doubt, dictates the future of the importance of individual ranking factors. But to illustrate why I think that is, I’ll back up a bit.

After reading all of the wild speculation about RankBrain, I noticed that there are a significant amount of people that still don’t know the basics of what machine learning does, the technology that RankBrain is said to be using. This is how Wikipedia describes it:

Machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data.

In essence, machine learning is used to make predictions. It can’t help Google magically figure out what is the best result is for a user who is conducting a specific search. That would involve things like definitively knowing exactly what “the best” is, and outside of things like math equations or historical facts, is most likely impossible. So for now, Google can only guess, and get really, really good at guessing.

And that’s why we’re talking about predictions.

So let’s now focus on figuring out how to make an accurate prediction. Predictions are based off a set of factors. The “secret sauce” of machine learning is figuring out which factors are more important than others in determining what you’re predicting. As Will put it in his article, it won’t be humans doing this manually in the future, but rather “the machine tweaking the dials.”

That explanation helps to explain why links and the concept of RankBrain are not at odds with each other. They’re apples and oranges. It’s like saying historical forecast data and a weatherman are at odds with each other over predicting the weather. One is information and the other is an interpreter. They are two separate types of things.

So hypothetically, in the case of links, two potential things could happen when machine learning gains more control over the ranking algorithm:

The dial is turned back on links, realizing that they’re not as good of an indicator of the quality & relevance of a website than what Google engineers had previously given them credit for.

The dial is turned up on links, realizing that they’re a better indicator of the quality & relevance of a website than what Google engineers had previously given them credit for.

To date, I’ve never seen the second hypothetical situation talked about. And while its probability can be (justly) questioned, I think it’s an interesting scenario to discuss.

What if the hysteria around links in our industry has caused Google engineers over time to manually & mistakenly give them less weight than they deserve? What if their new machine learning models indicate that quality links (remember: Penguin is changing the game here) are actually a really good indicator, more so than previously given credit for?

I don’t have a clear idea on the likelihood of each of the two hypothetical scenarios listed above, but let’s be clear: links being dialed up as a ranking signal due to new machine learning models is as real of a potential outcome as links being dialed down as a ranking signal.

Now that we understand the potential outcomes that machine learning in a ranking algorithm can have from the standpoint of links, it’s now time to discuss the probability of each outcome happening. This is where the real discussion begins. There are two main ways that a dramatic change could happen in the given value of links as a ranking signal:

Google engineers, previous to machine learning, had done a poor job in determining the exact importance of links as a ranking signal.

Google engineers, previous to machine learning, had done a poor job in determining the exact importance of other ranking signals.

And as a result of either, when a highly accurate machine learning model is introduced, the correction is made. The limited space within the algorithm would be re-distributed.

So let’s now discuss each of the above two possibilities separately.

Links As A Ranking Factor

The first option sounds improbable.

Links are the oldest signal in their algorithm. These PhDs have had almost two decades to screw around with the dial. It’s very reasonable to think that a machine learning model is not going to significantly alter their importance as a ranking signal, as it would imply that these engineers had been horribly wrong after all this time, in one direction or the other.

But there is a very real scenario to consider. It involves Penguin.

We’ve all seen numerous examples of link spam, even in shockingly recent times. Those examples, coupled with the insane amount of time Google has taken in releasing the next Penguin update, shows that they’re still scratching their heads & don’t quite have it all figured out.

But in the context of this investigation, its importance here is significant. It’s a wild card. I’ll explain why.

Let’s assume, just for a moment, that Google had been right for placing their immense trust in links as a ranking signal. Let’s pretend that somehow we were able to divinely identify what really was the best indicator of a quality search result, and that at the top of the list of indicators was links. This is important because, soon enough, they’re going to find this out the more that they use machine learning.

So, if Google’s views on the importance of links as a predictor of a quality search result does not change, what will happen when they perfect the art of cutting through the noise & only identify and give weight to links that indicate a true endorsement of a website (a quality link)? If Google has been giving links as much weight as it has in the past, even when they didn’t fully understand which links were good & which ones weren’t, just how much further would the dial potentially be turned up once they’re near-perfect at this?

The conclusion I’m trying to draw here is that, once again, there’s a very legitimate potential outcome that links could INCREASE in importance as a ranking factor as they continue to refine Penguin and their overall analysis of link-based factors.

I think that’s a profound realization, and yet, once again, it’s not even being discussed.

Personally, though, I don’t think that this will happen any time in the near future. Here’s why:

Overall, Google still seems to be far off in correctly classifying links 10 times of 10 as either spam or not.

The last Penguin update has taken a while. This could be because they’re not happy with the results, or because they’re putting internal resources elsewhere. Both aren’t good signs for links, although other reasons could exist.

There are many other new signals that haven’t been tested & used to the extent of links.

Other Ranking Factors

Now let’s discuss the second scenario. Unfortunately, it’s a much more complex discussion than the first because:

1 signal is simpler to discuss than hundreds of other individual ones & all their various combinations.

We’ve gotten information about links publically from Google. For a lot of other signals, we don’t know much.

As a historically important factor, there have been a lot of studies & opinion articles published about links in the marketing community.

So with that said, here are my main thoughts about this group as a whole.

1. Time. It’s on the side of a lot of new factors Google has been rolling into the algorithm over recent years, at least in comparison to links.

Machine learning aside, even though I’m guessing they’re much more efficient at doing so in 2016 than in 2006, they still haven’t had relatively much time to mess with the dials of each, as opposed to something like links.

Additionally, for a lot of newer signals, it’s doubtful that they’ve cut through all of the noise for each, in the same way that they’re trying to cut through the noise in regards to links via Penguin. I assume that’s what is holding back a lot of UX signals.

Note: for a more concrete set of timelines around specific factors, checkout SEO By The Sea. Bill Slawski has done a great job surfacing Google patents (as they’re granted) that talk about some of these, and they all have a filing date, which is better than nothing.

2. Segmentation of ranking algorithms. The implication of an answer given by Google in an FAQ help doc about the mobile friendliness update is just one piece of evidence signaling a division in SEO, in which the concept of a singular ranking algorithm is dated.

Earlier examples of this concept are found with things like the Payday Loans updates, in which the organic results of certain industries were ranked differently than for other industries.

In most cases, especially with things like mobile, I fail to see much of an opportunity for links to be a beneficiary of these segmentations. I more so see it as links being more or less a “fall back” when they aren’t able to use factors that do a really good job for specific segmentations of searches (i.e. UX factors for a search done on mobile, dwell times for an investigative search, etc.).

With that said, there are a number of very interesting problems that Google has here. A few of them are noted further down in this write up of a recent Googler’s presentation on search.

3. The increasing complexity of the algorithm. Inevitably as more signals have been introduced, and the dials of each have been tweaked and re-tweaked 100s of times, and that each of those dials are no longer universal and are now segmented for different types of searches users do, the complexity has grown.

From what’s been said publicly by Google about machine learning, the feeling I’ve gotten is that they’re working on it, but that we shouldn’t expect things to happen quickly, and my guess is because of the level of complexity behind integrating this technology into all of the various parts of organic search.

Overall, it’ll be interesting to see just how quickly Google will move now & in the future as their algorithm becomes increasingly complex, especially when most of it seems to still be driven by humans, not machines.

My Conclusions

Because the above evidence listed in various places throughout this post is far from substantial, I’m only confident in my conclusions from the standpoint of where we are today, not 5 years from now.

Tomorrow is not a guarantee. As we’ve seen, Google can move very quickly. With that said, even if Google decided this very morning to move away from links as a significant factor, I highly doubt they could make a major change within a ~12-18 month timeframe, just because links are so foundational to their search engine.

The concept of RankBrain is not a major threat to links. I even think there’s a very real chance that it’s not even a minor one.

There doesn’t seem to be a golden knight to replace links. The most talked about new set of factors is UX, and I have seen more than a few examples of specific UX signals being easily manipulated, even more so than links.

The real threat is more foundational than links. Justin Briggs explained it best in his response earlier. The aspect of ranking a page organically in Google’s results has slowly declined in value, both because of other SERP features & search ads. There’s still a ton of money to be made, but we should work like we’re living on borrowed time.

Things do change quickly. But for now, I won’t be hopping off the link bandwagon in the near future.

In this post we’re going to compare the most popular solutions for conducting & managing link building and/or PR outreach.

Which one should I use?

After my research & testing, it pains me to give such one-dimensional answers (cue waves of criticism), but since that’s what a lot of you are looking for, here’s the TL;DR version of what you should use:

In this post we’re going to compare the most popular solutions for conducting & managing link building and/or PR outreach.

Which one should I use?

After my research & testing, it pains me to give such one-dimensional answers (cue waves of criticism), but since that’s what a lot of you are looking for, here’s the TL;DR version of what you should use:

See the more in-depth comparison here. The group up for the most debate is the mid-size teams (i.e. ~5 people).

With that said, making a decision purely off the above is a very poor idea. They were made off a few critical assumptions that don’t hold true for ALL of you. Each platform has its own sets of advantages, so you need to answer these main questions before you can decide which is the best fit for you:

“What budget do I have to work with?” – If you’re so shoestring that you can’t afford shoestrings, spreadsheets are always free, and can probably do the job. Even if, understand how your options price as they scale. Some are more friendly than others.

“Do we want prospecting features built-in?” – More of you are in this bucket than I realize, but I don’t think it’s smart to be. If you do need them for whatever reason, this can impact your decision. But I’d rather you go elsewhere to get it done right (think Link Prospector, Ahrefs, Majestic, LRT, BuzzSumo, etc.) & simply import those lists, than by using tools where it’s not their bread & butter.

“Are we hand reviewing individual prospects?” – some of you may already know the exact set of sites they’re reaching out to (i.e. pulling a list of supplier websites) that don’t need to be qualified individually. If that’s the case, then you may not need these features in BuzzStream/Pitchbox.

“How many people are doing outreach?” – If it’s just you, then you don’t need to try to figure out who contacted which site saying what. You did it all yourself. Even if you did need to do in some small overlaps, a quick inbox search isn’t difficult.

“How many websites/clients are we doing outreach for?” – It makes a serious difference if you’re talking about outreach for one website or outreach for 10 websites. Even if you’re not doing multiple today, do you think you will be?

“How important to me is reporting?” – Do you want something you can send to a client/manager and not think twice on, or are you simply reporting to yourself / have your own reporting tools?

Why is this an important decision?

Outreach is a critical component of “getting shit done”, and doing it effectively & efficiently is essential for those serious about building links.

Beyond that:

If you’re looking to use one for the first time, getting it right from the beginning is huge. Moving platforms can be a pain.

If you’re already on one, despite that pain, it’s important to not be complacent & consider what’s now available. For example, 2 of the 4 options in this post were in their infancy even 18 months ago (as of this writing), and the other 2 have changed rapidly in that time as well.

Overall, if getting links faster, or getting MORE links, is important to you, than this is a critical decision. Don’t just take into account where you’re at now, but also where you’re going (if you plan to do more/less outreach in the future).

About Me + This Post

Before we get into each platform, it’s important to highlight my background. I run an agency of 10+ link builders, and we’ve used BuzzStream from the start. The purpose of researching & writing this post for myself was to help challenge my assumption that they’re the best option for us. With that said, I do have a relationship with BuzzStream, and have done my best to remove any bias of them & purely look at the value of each.

I sent each review in this post to someone at each of these companies, in order to make sure the validity of what I discovered, as well as clearing up any misconceptions (down to a very high level of detail). With that said, the features of each of these tools are changing rapidly; i.e. one screenshot I took was outdated in a week!

Further more, it’s worth highlighting that this post contains affiliate links for Ninja Outreach & BuzzStream. I would’ve also used affiliate links for Pitchbox & Outreach.io, but they don’t have affiliate programs (much to my dismay). But feel free to disregard the validity of this post due to those links.

Outreach Platform Reviews

With that said, after reviewing each of these 4 platforms, I realized that it was really a “two-horse race” between BuzzStream & Pitchbox. I talk about why here. As a result, I’ve reviewed the main two in as much detail as possible, and reviewed the other two in lesser detail (highlighting just the important things) which come later in the post.

Sections:

Setup

Overall, be prepared for somewhat of a learning curve, more than the other platforms in this post. This is a very flexible & scalable platform, but as a result, there’s a level of understanding needed.

After you initially sign up, you’ll be taken through a setup process that will look similar to the below:

There’s a handful of things you should setup immediately:

BuzzMarker – arguably the best feature of the entire platform, the BuzzMarker is a chrome extension that allows you to do a lot of things straight from the browser. Install it for now; we’ll talk more about it later.

Setup Email – setup each of the different email accounts you’ll be using during outreach. If you’re on Gmail, this is a 2-click setup process.

Setup Twitter – if you plan on doing any outreach / have any conversations with prospects on Twitter, set it up in a couple clicks.

Add Users – ignore for now.

Once you go through the above, you should be taken to a similar screen below.

Let’s explain what you’re looking at above in a few quick bullets:

We call this view ‘The Grid’. It’s essentially a table that will have rows for each prospect in a given project (there’s currently none).

In the top left, you’ll note that this tells you which project you’re in. Currently, I’m in ‘Example Project’.

There are 4 main views of The Grid: Websites, People, Link Monitoring, and Dashboard.

Websites – organized by the different domains of your prospects.

People – organized by the names of individuals of your prospects.

Links – organized by the specific pages you either have links from or are trying to get links from of your prospects.

Dashboard – shows outreach conversations across the entire team, or specific projects, or specific users, in one place.

Let’s look at a screenshot of what things look like in the Websites view when there are prospects in it.

You can configure the columns of your table to show a lot of different things (i.e. tags, type, any dates, metrics, contact info, custom fields, etc.). If BuzzStream logs it, you can configure to show it here.

Let’s now take a look at the People view.

Once again, configure the columns to what you want (too many options to list). It’s worth noting though the Website column; you can actually tie Website, People & Link records together, which is a vital aspect of the setup.

So, for example, if an author writes for multiple blogs, you can tie them together in their settings. If there are multiple pages on a single website you want to get a link from, you can tie them together.

Let’s now look at the Links view.

Note the ‘Check Backlinks’ button towards the top: it allows you to check the specific pages you’ve saved to see if they’re linking to the project’s domain.

Keeping the above intro in mind, let’s now dive into organization.

Organization

Overall, if you don’t get organization right, you won’t like BuzzStream. The app will seem tedious and hindering. It took me personally a while to get this right. But when I did, I unlocked a lot of the value it had to offer.

In the few screenshots shown above, there’s a lot going on within the app. Particularly, things like:

Projects – why would you want to split things up into their own projects? When is this appropriate?

Custom fields – only Relationship Stage was mentioned so far, but what are custom fields, and what are they used for?

And some things that haven’t been mentioned yet:

Users – if I’ve got multiple people on my team, how should they be organized within the app?

Categorization – how can I categorize prospects in a way that scales to multiple website types, topics & verticals?

I’ll start by illustrating how my team organizes things in BuzzStream.

Projects & Folders

Our organization of projects starts off in one of 3 main folders:

Note: folders are used specifically, and only, to divide up projects. There are no folder-specific settings.

Within each of the 2 client folders (Current + Archived), we have a folder for each client. Within each client folder, we have projects for each of our main service offerings (i.e. Main Tactic #1 & Main Tactic #2). We do this because they’re essentially different divisions within our team. We usually only do 1 per client, but we like to stay organized in this way, in case we latch on another service offering in the future.

How you want to personally divide up projects is up to you, but there’s one key project setting you should key into:

As you can see from the above, in your project settings, you designate a URL or domain that you’re trying to build links to. This is ultimately what’s used in the Link Monitoring part of the app, which we’ll talk about later.

So I highly recommend you split up specific sites (or clients) into different projects, at the very least, given this feature. There’s no limit to the projects you can create in BuzzStream.

Also, another important project setting worth noting here is the ability to select which users have access to it.

Custom Fields

I view custom fields as the bread & butter of BuzzStream. They enable you to organize & customize campaigns in any which way you want.

We’ll start with an example. One of the very few required custom fields is Relationship Stage. In essence, this states where a specific prospect is at in the pipeline. Here’s an example of some of the Stages we use.

Here are the most important ones for us:

Not Yet Researched – we’ve saved the prospect as qualified, but haven’t prepped for outreach (i.e. found contact info, wrote the email, etc.).

Prepped for Outreach – this is specifically for those we’ve prepped for outreach, but have a contact form URL. We save them here until an appropriate time of day & week to submit the form (since this can’t be automated / queued up for a future time/day).

Not Started – those we’ve prepped for outreach, and have an email queued up for a future time. When it gets sent, the prospect automatically moves into Attempting to Reach.

There are others, but the above makes up the vast majority. But the cool thing is, you can customize all of the above.

Note: the only 3 you can’t edit are Not Started, Attempting to Reach, and Link Accepted. The first 2 are because they automatically move prospects from 1 to the other (respectively) once a queued email gets sent, and the last is used for their link monitoring feature (if they find a link on the URL you’ve saved, their stage automatically gets moved to Link Accepted).

With the above said, that’s just our Relationship Stage field. We have 20+ custom fields just for website records, and 8 for link records.

Note: your custom fields will be divided up by the type of record, going back to the Website/People/Links division mentioned in the Setup section. So, for example, you might have ‘Role’ as a field for People, but that wouldn’t make sense for Links, whereas you might have a ‘Page Title’ field for that, based off your preferences.

We use custom fields for 3 different reasons:

Filtering / Division – if you’re looking for a specific segment of prospects, filtering by that custom field allows us to easily find them. In the same way, this division of organization helps for process management.

Template fields – a custom field value can be used in an outreach template (but unfortunately, only Website fields).

Data analysis – very recently, we’ve had data entry workers analyzing prospects and pulling out specific data points, and saving them in a specific field, which makes the data structured in a way that it can be pulled out via the API (i.e. specific approaches took).

When creating a new custom field, you’ll get the below options screen.

It’s worth highlighting each setting:

Name – this can’t be the same as any other custom field already created, given that they’re called in templates by name.

Type – in the above, I’ve selected Checkbox, but you can choose any of the below:

Text

Checkbox

Dropdown

Number

Date

Enable field in… – if you only want that custom field for specific project, you can specify here. If it’s a universal field, you need to choose if its value will be project-specific, or universal (i.e. Relationship Stage is a project-specific value; your stage with that client/prospect combination is unique to just that client).

Disable – you can disable a field at any time, if you want to reduce clutter within the app while still keeping it on the books.

Once a field is created, and used across the app, you can then filter by it in the grid:

Note: if you’re wondering, you can filter by just about anything in the grid. I’ve yet to find structured data that I can’t filter by.

Additionally, as mentioned previously, you can pull out any custom field values via the API (given some of the limitations of the API, this can be a great workaround).

Users

Since pricing is primarily based off the number of users on your team, this is worth mentioning in detail.

Everyone on our team is their own user. We do this because we do a lot data analysis about each individual team member. We couldn’t do this unless each had their own account, and as a result, having all of their data segmented.

If you’re not looking to analyze each team member in detail, or can do it in another way (i.e. if person A is responsible only for task X, and no one else is, then we can assume that any time task X is completed, it’s done by that person, and can be analyzed/attributed accordingly), then you wouldn’t need to divide things up in this way. So really it’s up to you.

With that in mind, one key area of users is Roles. You can assign them a specific role, which you can customize on the below page.

Note: one role our team will soon have is a Manager role, but for the time being & up until about ~15 people, I’m basically doing all those functions.

Here’s a look at our team’s most popular role, ‘Standard Link Builder’:

You’re allowed to customize a user’s role by any main functionality or part of the app (with a few exceptions).

Also mentioned previously, you can split up access to specific projects by user, which is also handy.

Pro tip: if you want to get rid of a user, but want all of their data intact (assigned to them, meaning it can be segmented by them), ask the support team to ‘Archive’ the user. Archived users won’t count towards your account’s user limit.

One usability detail – a user can only respond to an email from within the app if they sent the original email. So if you have one person sending initials, but another responding, you can only respond within BuzzStream by having them both use a single user account (see earlier section on pros/cons here).

Website Categorization

One last area that my team is finally cracking the code on is how to organize up specific prospects from a topical perspective, in case you want to say, for example, “show me all marketing blogs we’ve gotten to write about our product.”

I recommend the use of Tags for this. You can create any number of tags within BuzzStream, it’s easy to filter by, and you can use multiple tags per prospect (it’s highly likely a site will be about multiple topics). They’re also easier to manage than a checkbox custom field.

If you go this route, it’s absolutely essential that you & your team have an agreed upon list/hierarchy of topics. Otherwise, this won’t work! Imagine if user A marked one site as ‘Auto’, user B marked it as ‘Cars’, and user C marked it as ‘Automobiles’. Filtering would be hell on earth, I tell you.

From my own personal research, I’ve found the following to be great sources of pre-defined hierarchies of topics:

Dmoz – they categorized the Web, and did a hell of a job at it.

BOTW Blogs – the largest hand-curated blog directory I could find. They get paid a lot, so they probably care a lot about categorization.

Alchemy – you can actually download an Excel file of their taxonomy classifications (alternate link if it ever gets removed).

My team ended up building our own, but used the above 3 as guides.

As for deeper levels of categorization, if we used a tag that was 3 levels deep (i.e. Science > Agriculture > Forestry), we would use all 3 tags. Unfortunately though, you can’t filter by those with only a single tag (i.e. just those tagged as Science, but nothing else), so there are certain things my team & I are still working through.

Templates

This is less of an organization thing, and more of a “you should understand this before you get going” thing.

Your outreach templates can be found via the below button at the top of the page of each project’s Website tab.

From there, you can see all universal or project-specific templates, along with response rates of each.

When you go to create a new template, you’ll get the below screen.

A few specific things:

You can choose if a template is universal, or only for that specific project.

You can choose to keep a template private, or share it with the rest of the team.

Fields that you can use in templates can be found in the right sidebar. This includes website custom fields, people custom fields, BuzzStream user first/last names, and unsubscribe options.

Other than that, it’s a fairly straightforward template creation module.

BuzzMarker

I decided to mark this tool as its own section given how important it is to the platform. It has a few different uses, which we’ll go into below.

For my team, it’s a central part of our workflow; we spend more time with it than in the main app itself.

View/Save details of a specific prospect

This is the main functionality of the extension. When it’s toggled, a pane will show on the right side of the screen, allowing you to save the current website to your current project.

If a website has already been saved to BuzzStream, you can view or edit any of its details. If that’s the case, the right-sided pane will look like the below.

From there, you can edit any website details, link (specific URL) details, add notes, or conduct outreach, which we’ll talk about next.

Conduct Outreach

One of my team’s favorite features is being able to send an outreach email directly from the page you’re viewing, by clicking on this icon.

You’ll then get the below prompt at the bottom of your screen.

From here, you can format the email, use your templates, set reminders, and use attachments. After the email is filled out, you can either send now, or send it at a later date (and down to a specific minute of the day).

Create a prospecting list

This allows you to view a list of active links on a page (i.e. on a Google SERP) in a carousel mode, allowing you to quickly view each back-to-back.

Simply right click on a page, and choose ‘create a prospecting list’.

From there, you’ll get a prompt on the right side of your screen, detailing the list of links on the page.

You can edit the list by deleting any specific ones. You’ll also get notes on if they’ve been added to another project. When you’re ready, hit ‘Start Prospecting’.

You’ll now be able to view/edit the details of each, and be able to quickly go to the next in the list using the next/back buttons at the bottom of the screen.

If you have a list of URLs you want to view, you can make them active links on a given webpage by pasting them into a tool like URLOpener.com. We’ll show a use case of this in the Workflow section below.

View highlighted contacts

This allows you to check which active links on a page are on domains that have already been saved, either to that specific project (dark green) or to any project (light green).

Prospecting

BuzzStream does have a prospecting feature built in. As with most tools, all it’s doing is scraping Google, so if you have more specialized tools for that, you’re not missing out here.

To use their prospecting feature, locate the ‘Add Websites’ button in the Websites view of your project, and select ‘Find Prospects > Create New Prospecting Profile’.

Once you do, you’ll get the below screen.

First, you’ll name it & set the country (which version of Google being scraped); for the international folks, you can scrape from 100+ different countries.

Second, you’ll come up with the prospecting searches. I won’t go into what you should be coming here, and will defer to these resources.

Third, you can set it up to run on a weekly basis (recommended; results Google shows vary all the time), and get notifications of new prospects.

After creating a new prospecting profile, you can now find this segment of prospects in the menu here.

After it finds results (takes a couple minutes), you’ll get the below view in the grid.

The main new thing you’ll notice are the 3 buttons to the right of the domains listed. Before explaining each button, it’s worth mentioning that this list of websites from your prospecting report can only be found when specifically view this prospecting list. These websites won’t show up in your normal Websites view. With that said, here are what those 3 buttons do:

Thumbs up – prospect is removed from list, and is added to your project’s list of Websites.

Thumbs down – prospect is removed from list.

Crossed out circle – prospect is added to your blacklist, so you’re cautioned not to add them / reach out to that website in the app in the future.

You can view the prospecting list efficiently by utilizing their BuzzBar, something you’ll find mentioned here:

You can view specifically selected prospects in this feature, or the entire prospecting list. It’s your choice. Once you’re viewing them using the BuzzBar, you’ll get the below screen.

From this screen, you’ll be taken one-by-one through each prospect in the list, where you can qualify any using the 3 buttons (see top left), save any specific details in the right column, conduct outreach (see top right-ish), and then go to the next prospect in the list.

There are some other aspects to the BuzzBar beyond that, but overall, I’m not focusing on it because I’ve been told that they’ll be deprecating the BuzzBar sometime in the future and simply just use the BuzzMarker (a much better alternative for reasons explained later).

However, for now, the only way to view a prospecting list (using the 3 aforementioned buttons) straight from the dashboard is with the BuzzBar. A workaround for this, if you’d like to view them in the BuzzMarker (addressed later), is to select them all in the left-most column, and then hit Export.

You’ll then get the list of prospect URLs in a CSV.

Take that list of URLs and paste them into a tool like URLOpener.com, which will simply make the URLs active links on a page.

Right click on that page, and using the BuzzMarker, choose “Create a prospecting list”.

You’ll then be able to view them in a carousel view, just like the BuzzBar, but without some of its viewing limitations.

With that said, let’s now talk about what workflow looks like.

Workflow

Because BuzzStream is such a flexible platform, there’s a number of ways you can do things using the tools & functionalities they provide. With that said, as a long-time user, I wanted to show how we primarily use the platform for the various tasks we perform on a regular basis.

Our overall process looks like this:

I do all the up-front prospecting myself, and pass off prospecting lists to our team, grouped by client.

We send the initial emails, conduct follow ups, and respond to emails until we draw a conclusion with each prospect.

Based off that process, I’ll now walk through what our workflow looks like. We’ll start #2 in the list, given we do prospecting outside of the app.

Note: our workflow is very similar to how Pitchbox is structured out-of-the-box. The below shows how you can work in a similar way within BuzzStream, if things are setup properly.

Reviewing Prospects

Each team member starts with a list of URLs. Their goal is to quickly figure out which ones are qualified (both authoritative + obtainable), and then save them to BuzzStream so we can collect further information on them later.

To start, they take that list of URLs, and paste them into a tool like URLOpener.com, in order to view them in the BuzzMarker chrome extension.

At this point, now that they’re being displayed as a prospecting list in BuzzMarker, it’s as easy as doing a few quick things:

Setting Default Values

First, at the beginning of any batch of prospects we’re reviewing, we locate this default settings icon at the top of the panel.

Once clicked, you’ll get this prompt to enter in values for fields that will be used for each new website we save.

There’s a number we use internally, and 4-5 are based off the campaign type we’re doing, so being able to set this up-front (and not for each individual website) saves a lot of time. Once we’re finished, we’ll simply hit Done.

Make An Assessment

From here, now we can view the entire page in our browser that we’re reviewing, and can click through to any other pages on the website, and still have the BuzzMarker settings handy.

Save the Prospect

If we decide that it’s a good prospect, all we have to do is hit is save it in one click.

We then save that specific page as a new Link record (the first save was for the domain).

From there, at this point in our process, we don’t do anything else. We simply go to the next prospect in the list. This allows us to isolate the reviewing process, and get things down to only a couple clicks for each we review.

Overall, this process allows us to only save the good prospects to BuzzStream, instead of importing ALL, which removes a lot of junk from the app.

Collecting Personalized Info

Once we’ve saved enough qualified prospects to BuzzStream (we usually batch things by about 50), we then move to this step. We’re now going to collect all contact info & custom field inputs used in our templates.

Going into the grid, we’ll filter by all of those in the specific relationship stage of those that have been only simply saved (we mark them as ‘Not Yet Researched’).

We’d now like to view them in the BuzzMarker again, this time collecting this info, but unfortunately this can’t be done easily. Currently, the grid is only setup to view them in the BuzzBar, but viewing it that way has a lot of limitations that you’ll find out the more you use it.

So to get them into the BuzzMarker, after this filter, we’ll then have to export this list as a CSV.

In the CSV, we’ll then copy & paste all of either the URLs in the ‘Linking From’ column (if we’re looking to get links from specific pages) or the domains in the ‘Domain’ column into a tool like URLOpener.com, and then view them as a prospecting list.

From there, we’ll use the auto-discovered contact info as aids while we look for any other contact info, and also take notes about the specific pages/websites that we’ll be using for our templates & processes.

Sending Emails

From there, we now have everything we need for our initial emails. For those who want complete automation for this step, you unfortunately can’t bulk send, but you can send initials in a click each from the grid.

Note on the left side of the screen: you can view history details (i.e. past emails, past tweets, notes, etc.), Link record details, recent RSS feed items (if a feed was found), other contact info and social profile links (if saved).

With that said, my team doesn’t do outreach in this way; we like to personalize our emails quite a bit, and found that sending the emails right from the page (directly after we collected those personalization fields) allows us to figure out ways we can make the emails more personal.

So for us, we’re sending the initials from the BuzzMarker. We’ll start the email, as shown below, but also minimize this email screen so we can view the entire page, check for things, then go back and make any necessary edits to the email.

We’ll usually queue these up to send later (see the arrow next to ‘Send now’), then move to the next prospect in the list, and repeat the process.

After sending initial emails, we have processes for:

Conducting follow ups – unfortunately manual. We segment up those we need to do follow ups by the # of times they’ve been contacted in the past, and send the follow ups from the grid.

Contacting someone else – if we don’t hear back from that first piece of contact info, we ‘repurpose’ them by finding new contact info & reaching out again (with a new message, usually noting our first email). We use a custom field to segment these.

Responding to emails – this could be done via the dashboard, but it’s difficult to manage, given there isn’t a single inbox location for emails received, and because some emails don’t go through that are matched to specific prospects. So this is done via the original email’s inbox, and we have BuzzStream open in another tab to make any relationship stage edits.

With that said, that wraps up the majority of our normal workflow.

Reporting

Currently, there are no out-of-the-box reporting features of BuzzStream for the average user.

You can, however, export all fields of any websites in any projects, and use that data in any reporting tools of your own. But you currently won’t find any ready-made reports with graphs/charts to export.

With that said, one of the biggest reasons why my team uses BuzzStream is for their reporting. They have an extensive API. We’ve built countless reporting tools of off the data we can get out of it. It’s just unfortunately not an option for the average user to build with it, given you’d need a developer to dive in.

I won’t talk too much about the API, given you’d need to learn more about what you can/can’t get out if it based off the documentation, but one thing worth noting is that their API Explorer makes things very easy for me when working with a developer. It’s a non-developer friendly tool to figure out what you can (and can’t) pull out, and how to identify for your developer what you want being pulled out.

Other Features

With all of the above said, there are some specific things not mentioned in detail. The below list is simply things not addressed in the above breakdown.

Tasks – you can select a group of websites and assign them as tasks to a specific person. You can then view any tasks of yours in the Dashboard tab, at the top right sidebar.

Notes – you can add custom notes about specific websites, which can be found in the History tab of their profile.

Blacklist – this was briefly mentioned before, but their blacklist feature allows you to mark individual websites as ‘Do Not Contact’, or bulk upload a list ahead of time. This can be done for domains, specific email addresses, or even Twitter accounts.

Reminders – as mentioned previously, you can’t automate follow ups, but you can set reminders for specific prospects if you don’t hear back after X days, and you can also set notifications for when you hear back.My team doesn’t use tasks, but I believe they also get listed in the reminders list, along with the aforementioned specific email settings.

Bugs & Drawbacks

As a user of BuzzStream myself, I’ve got a very good grasp on things we don’t like about the platform, and things that need to be fixed. The below list is sorted by importance.

No inbox – this is probably the biggest area. Having to exit the app to continue email conversations from a separate inbox has its limitations. Email matching is more difficult, and viewing prospect details isn’t quick.

Manual follow-ups – this has been brought up previously. My team tracks our time for specific tasks, and know that it adds up when having to do follow ups manually, even if only in a couple clicks.

Bugginess of BuzzMarker – this sentiment has been specifically pointed out by other users of BuzzStream as well. We actually have an internal doc for our team of how to handle certain problems (usually involves installing then re-installing the extension at times…). Most the issues are intermittent; they’ll only last a few minutes. But it can definitely be buggy at times, some worse than others.

Matching email logic – their logic for figuring out which prospect an email is from is mediocre (they only match by the exact address being emailed from). Some very easy to figure out emails don’t get marked, so for tracking purposes, we have to add all new email addresses to a specific website’s profile before future emails are then tracked & logged.

Going to BuzzMarker prospecting lists from the app – noted above is our workaround for viewing a list of websites in the BuzzMarker from the app. You can use the Buzzbar, but it’s very limiting (it’s essentially an iframe).

Link fields in templates – you can only use website custom fields in templates, not link or people custom fields.

Default link fields in BuzzMarker – you can set default website fields when saving new prospects in the BuzzMarker, but you can’t set defaults for link fields as well.

Saving auto-discovered contact info – all auto-discovered contact info gets automatically saved to all website records. This becomes especially annoying in the BuzzMarker, when you don’t want to use what’s discovered, and have to delete each item before saving.

Embedding images in emails – my team doesn’t personally need this, but I know there are those out there that do.

There are a number of very tiny issues we’ve noticed beyond these 8 (i.e. things like not being able to edit the type of note from the BuzzMarker), but they have minor workarounds.

Sections:

Setup & Organization

After you initially sign up & get logged in, the first thing you’ll do is create a Project. Projects are what the pricing model is based off of. My assumption is that you would segment clients & target sites up by different Projects, so look at this aspect mostly from an organizational perspective (although it’s worth noting that opportunities, or prospects, are de-duplicated at a project-level).

Once you name & create your first Project, you will now be taken to a page to create your first campaign. This is where things really begin. The screen for doing this is below.

Campaigns are what Pitchbox is built around. They have 8 built-in campaign types (listed below), but also allow for custom imports of websites & contacts. If you select one of their campaign types, they do the prospect discovery for you. Here’s what they are:

Blogger Outreach – you input keywords, they give you a list of blog articles.

Product Reviews – you input keywords, they give you a list of blogs that (they think) have featured review articles in the past.

48 Hour Blog Search – you input keywords, they give you a list of blog articles published in last 48 hours.

Competitor Backlinks (NEED to integrate w/ Majestic OR LRT) – you input competitor domains, they give you a list of URLs linking to them.

Link Removal (default OR using LRT) – doesn’t prospect; you have to provide the list of URLs. But makes things very efficient for getting links removed.

As a result, you don’t have to come ready with a list of sites ready to research.

Creating A Campaign

We’ll start by looking at the main group of built-in campaign types they offer that offer prospecting functionality that is ready out-of-the-box. Specifically, those are the Blogger Outreach, Advanced Search, Product Reviews & 48 Hour Blog Search campaign types.

For this group, once you click ‘Create’, you’ll be taken to this screen.

We’ll go down the list for each of the fields & inputs:

Campaign Name – simply, what you want to call it.

Country – from my understanding, country-specific version of Google they’ll be scraping (getting their results from).

Keywords – the most important part. The quality of the results you get back will be dictated by the keywords you come up with. Pitchbox has a tutorial video here for the selection process. Overall, the process isn’t any different than the one you’d use when scraping Google for link prospects with any other tool.

Max Results – this dictates how many results in Google you want scraped. The more results, the more prospects (but they get more irrelevant the further you go).

Quality Filter – the options for this feature is hidden by default; it allows you to filter your results by certain quality metrics (as shown below). Specifically, by Google PageRank, both Majestic Citation Flow & Trust Flow, LRT Power*Trust, and Moz metrics (DA + MozRank on domain & subdomain levels). You can set your own filters, or you can use one of their pre-built “good” or “great” filters.

Advanced Options – also hidden by default; allows you to select four options. First, if you want ‘Approval Workflow’. We’ll explain this feature later. Second, if you want them to find contact info for you. Third, to disable their auto de-duplication (on a project level). And lastly, to make Recurring, so new prospects are found on a regular basis (i.e. re-scraping Google, checking Majestic again, etc.).

With the above said, the type of campaign you select will dictate the type of results you get back. For example, if you selected Product Reviews, you’ll get back a list of any pages found through Google that are both about your keyword, and have any footprint specific to that type (i.e. by appending “review” or “product review” to the keywords for your searches).

Alternatively, if you integrate your Majestic credentials with the tool, you’ll have a different campaign setup screen, as shown below.

Instead of keywords, you’ll enter the domains of your competitors, and instead of setting a max # of results scraped for each keyword, you’ll enter a max # of linking pages.

Finally, if you have your own set of prospects already, then you can simply upload them view the ‘Website Import’ campaign type, as shown below. It’s as easy as entering the URLs into a text area, or uploading a CSV.

Once you’ve filled out all the settings for the campaign you’re creating, scroll to the bottom and hit ‘Next’. You’ll now be asked to create an email template, as shown below.

If you don’t have any idea where to start when creating your template, you can use some of the ones they provide themselves in the righthand sidebar.

For example, here’s what ‘The Godfather Offer’ template looks like. Overall, they have ~20 built-in templates that you can use that are for all kinds of campaign types (PR included).

As you may notice in the above example, they not only allow for custom variables in your emails, but also for conditional logic. The template states “Dear [First Name],” if a name is found, but if not, simply state “Hello,”. For the advanced crowd out there, conditional logic is a HUGE perk. For more info on what you can do with that logic, it’s using Smarty.

Pro tip: when writing follow up templates, you can pull in the original email sent (so it’s seen as if you’re replying to it) with the {{OPPORTUNITY_PREVIOUS_OUTREACH_EMAIL}} tag).

Once your main template is setup, you’ll be taken to a final setup screen, as shown below. Simply confirm the email address being used for the campaign, and the templates used for the email sequence. You have the option for setting up automated follow ups (up to 2; so 3 emails in total), and can specify the # of days in between when the follow ups are sent.

Now that we’re finished, the tool will then start to find contact information for each of the websites you entered (given you didn’t un-check this option). When that’s finished, on your campaigns page, you’ll have a graph like the below detailing how many prospects are in that campaign.

By clicking the blue bar, you’ll be taken to the first stage of conducting a campaign, which is labeled ‘Inspecting’. We’ll talk more on this next.

Conducting A Campaign

Now that you’ve either prospected for new opportunities, or imported a list of URLs, you’re ready to get into the main workflow of the tool, one of its greatest assets.

The workflow of conducting a campaign is split up into 3 main areas:

Inspect – reviewing the opportunities (unless the URLs you imported are pre-qualified).

Personalize – reviewing the contact info they collected, and finding the inputs for custom template variables (i.e. “Blog Name”, “Post Title”, etc., which in some cases, are also scraped ahead of time).

Compose – previewing & sending each individual email (and editing if necessary), or just bulk sending them all at once.

We’ll now go into each of those 3 in detail.

Inspecting Opportunities

First, we need to inspect each opportunity to see if it’s a good fit for our campaign. You can review each URL without even leaving the app, as shown below.

As a result, it’s very easy to breeze through this part of the process if you need to vet individual URLs. When you determine if one is qualified, simply hit the blue ‘Move to Personalization’ button, moving it into the next stage of the process.

An additional feature of this part of the tool is the list of metrics displayed in the columns on the right hand side, as shown below.

You can click any of those and easily sort the list each from top to bottom.

Note: if the list of URLs you imported are already qualified for whatever reason, you can simply use the checkbox at the top left of the panel to Select All, and then all at once, click ‘Move to Personalization’.

After you’re finished going through all the prospects, for those that you didn’t move into the next stage (Personlization), you don’t necessarily have to delete them. You may want to, but we’ll talk about why later.

Personalizing Opportunities

Next, it’s time to get all the details we need from each website for our email. That usually means contact info, and custom variables for our templates.

To start, go to the ‘Personalize’ tab, and look for the ‘Personalize’ button next to each website record, as shown below.

Upon clicking, you’ll have three main areas on your screen: the contact info they collected, personalization fields used for your templates, and the webpage open for you to look at.

From here, you can review the contact info selected & make any necessary edits/removals/additions & edit in the appropriate custom variables.

Starting with the contact information, it’s important to understand the implications of what you leave in here. For every address they find, if you don’t delete it from the list, it will be included in an email sequence that sends your email to ALL of them (unless someone gets back to one of them or to one of your follow ups).

As an example, if they found 2 addresses, and you set a main template & a follow up template with 5 days in between sending each, then here’s what your email sequence will look like:

Now: main email is sent to contact #1

In 5 days: follow up email is sent to contact #1

In 10 days: main email is sent to contact #2

In 15 days: follow up email is sent to contact #2

And so on & so forth for each address entered in that section (which you can drag-and-drop the order of). Therefore, it’s important to review each, and see if they’re relevant or not. If they’re not, then they should be deleted from the list.

One noteworthy thing to aid you in this process is their ‘Enhance Contacts’ feature. You can find this as a star next to each piece of contact info, as shown below.

Upon clicking, if the appropriate info is found, they’ll display a heap of extra things about that contact, as shown below.

So keep that in mind when investigating certain contacts.

Moving on, one nice feature of the section for personalized fields is that you can see the context of where they’re being inserted into the template, so you can mouth how it would sound & see if it fits.

It’s also worth noting that for certain fields (i.e. Blog Name), they’ll go out & do they’re best to find them for you, just like with contact information. In example of some auto-scraped info is below.

After you’ve reviewed & edited all the necessary contact info & personalization fields, you can both preview the email to see what it will look like with those fields, and save & go to the next prospect in the list.

The email preview screen is nice because the personalization fields entered are highlighted, as shown below in my amazing template.

Now that we’re finished with this one, click ‘Submit to Compose’, and you’ll be taken to the next prospect in the group to do this all over again for.

If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to individually review each URL for this personalization stage, and just want to go straight to composing the email (using the contact info they collected), you can do so with the ‘Bypass Personalization’ button here. Just select all with the checkbox on the left, and click that button.

We’re now ready for the final stage: Compose.

Composing Emails

At this point, we’ve now got all the info we need for the email, and are ready to do one of two things: Preview & Send, or Launch Automation Sequence.

Preview & Send allows you to review & edit each email before you queue it to send, while Launch Automation Sequence queues them all up to send in one click.

If the same person doing the Personalizing is also doing the Composing, and no further personalization happens beyond the custom fields, then you can just hit Launch Automation Sequence and be done with it.

But if a separate person is doing each, then the person doing the Composing might want to review the work done by the one who Personalized. In this case you would have to have the “Workflow Approval” feature on. This allows you to review ones work, and “Reject” it if the work needs to be re-done.

Additionally, for the Preview & Send screen, there are a few things worth pointing out.

First, you’ll see a list of all emails in your sequence for that prospect. This number is determined by the # of email addresses you have for it, as well as the # of email attempts (main + follow ups).

Second, make sure you select the ‘Auto Follow-Up Sequence’ at the bottom, which is not selected by default. This automates the sending of follow ups. Otherwise, Pitchbox will notify you when you need to send a follow up, which is additional manual work that should instead just be automated from the start 9 out of 10 times.

Once you hit Send, your emails will be queued up and sent based off your outreach schedule in your campaign settings (which we’ll talk about next).

In case you queued up emails by mistake, if they haven’t been sent out yet, you can find them by clicking here.

On that page, you can move any individual (or group) of emails back into the Compose section, just with a few clicks of a checkbox.

Campaign Settings

There is a few settings you should make yourself aware of before any emails go out. The most important of them is the outreach schedule, as shown below.

This is a great feature because this means you don’t need to select the day/time for each email.

One thing to note about exactly what time the emails are sent – the group you have queued up will be spread out over the appropriate times you have selected for the next appropriate day. So for example, going with the screenshot above, if I queued up 20 emails on a Sunday, they will be sent out on Tuesday, all randomly between 8:30AM and 6:00PM (in the timezone assigned in the project settings).

Other than the outreach schedule, you can also manage your personalization fields in the campaign settings.

Notably, you can make some fields required, and you can give a descriptive help message to aid the person doing the Personalizing.

Other that your outreach schedule & personalization fields, you can also edit any of the details that you entered when you first created the campaign, both General settings & Template settings.

Email Responses

At this point, we’ve now sent out our initial emails, and are now starting to receive responses back. One of the great features of Pitchbox is that they have a built-in inbox, so you can respond to emails right from their dashboard.

In this case, we’re paying attention to both the ‘Inbox’ & the ‘Unmatched Emails’ items in the left hand sidebar.

From a workflow perspective, you’ll start by going into the Unmatched Emails section. These are emails received back, that Pitchbox doesn’t know which exact prospect it’s from. It’s VITAL that we match them with which prospect they are in their system, so no automated follow ups go out after they respond.

This part of their tool is quite cool; here’s an example of one of those unmatched email records I got.

On the right side, you’ll notice the ‘Suggestions’ area towards the bottom. This is their best educated guess for which prospect this is. In the example above, they got it right, and took one click to match it. If the suggestion doesn’t look right, you can use the search box, and i.e. type in the domain of the email address you received, or anything else you can think of trying.

Once you match the email, it gets removed from the ‘Unmatched Emails’ section and goes into your inbox. So, in terms of process, go through these first & make the matches, then respond to them in the inbox.

Here’s what the inbox looks like.

A few specific things worth pointing out:

You can filter by the email account used, so if you’ve got multiple team members working in the same project, each can see their own emails this way.

In the ‘Opportunity’ column, you can see the Campaign the prospect is from. However, you can’t filter by this.

Having the link metrics included would hypothetically allow you prioritize which emails to get back to first by those that are most authoritative

Let’s click on a specific email so we can reply. Below is what your compose screen looks like. There’s a LOT going on, so we’ll go into each.

Specifically, I wanted to point out:

Notes – you can log specific notes/observations for your own records, listed at the top. Some things will be marked here automatically, i.e. who personalized/approved the prospect for outreach, if Workflow Approval is turned on.

Personalization data – purely for reference, it’s easy to find in the right sidebar.

Past Conversations – found below the email.

Campaign Details – which campaign they’re in, where they’re at in the pipeline, milestone details, and even metrics.

Contact Info – specific contacts, if there are multiple for that prospect.

Tasks – can assign specific tasks for that prospect for anyone on your team, and set a due date, as shown below.

When you are ready to reply to that email, click the ‘Reply’ button, and you’ll get this editor screen.

Two very useful things worth pointing out are:

Canned Responses – a Gmail-esque feature that allows you to easily insert templated responses. Big time-saver. You can set these up in your Account Settings.

Milestone – update where they’re at in the pipeline right at the bottom here.

Now that we’ve responded to our emails, there’s one last feature we can look at – Pitchbox allows you to see all emails in the ‘All Emails’ item in the sidebar.

This allows you to see all emails sent or received. You can split up your sent emails by (1) the initial & automated follow ups you’ve sent, and (2) your email responses to those that got back to you.

Reporting

The last main part of Pitchbox is their reporting functionality. Comparatively to other platforms to date, they do a pretty good job in this area.

Note: I’ll do my best to screenshot everything, but the data in my account is limited (only did a small campaign for the sake of this post).

There are two main reporting areas in the toolset: their Project Overview section, and their Pipeline section.

The Project Overview section gives you an idea on the raw numbers of the campaign in terms of what’s been done, and what needs to be done.

This gives you a ‘quantity’ perspective on how things are going, which can even be broken down by campaign.

The Pipeline section is split up into three views: Pipeline, Aging, & Performance. Starting with their default view (Pipeline), it illustrates what # of prospects are in which stages of your campaign.

The Aging report shows how long prospects have been sitting in certain milestones, so you can monitor if things are moving through your pipeline.

Finally, the Performance reports gives you a breakdown of response rates & success rates, contrasted with the main pipeline report.

At the bottom of each of those 3 reports, a table is displayed of each of the prospects, which you can sort by the main aspect that the report you’re viewing is about (i.e. for the Aging report, you can sort by Date Found).

These 3 reports give you a ‘quality’ perspective on how things are going, which again, can be broken down by campaign.

Other Features

Not everything found in Pitchbox can fit into each of the above sections, and for some, they were only briefly. So I wanted to break down a handful of features that got either brief mentions or no mentions at all, sorted by importance.

Great customer service – you can ask their team questions directly from the app, and I got a response by email within 24 hours each time. In some cases, they went to great length to help.

Workflow Approval – this feature allows you to have specific team members work on specific parts of the workflow process, and have their work approved before it’s used.

Tasks – this feature allows you to assign specific tasks to specific members of your team, setup exactly when they’re due, and see if they’re completing their tasks via the Project Overview section.

Link Research Tools integration – if you do a lot of link removal campaigns & use Link Research Tools, this integration makes Pitchbox a no-brainer for you. Here’s a video of how it works.

Other Integrations – you can also integrate with Moz, SEMrush, HipChat & (very recently) Slack. Moz & SEMrush are for metrics, and HipChat & Slack are for pushing notifications.

Blacklist – if there are certain sites you want to make sure you never contact, there’s a Blacklist feature in your Account Settings that’s fairly straightforward.

Address Book – you can search specific email addresses of those you’ve contacted, and quickly scan over the emails you’ve exchanged with them.

Bookmarklet – you can add new opportunities to a campaign with their simple bookmarklet. It’s fairly simple; see the screenshot below. Just click it when you land on a URL you want to add.

Default values for templates – in your templates, you can set default values for any of the custom variables you use (i.e. if you’re doing scholarship link building, having the ‘page title’ field be ‘Scholarships’ by default).

Image embeds – you can embed images into your emails via their email editor, something not offered by every outreach tool in this post.

Overall non-buggy-ness – it’s worth noting that I really didn’t run into any bugs in my time using the app, and I even enjoyed some of the tinier, usually overlooked aspects of UX (i.e. if you go to your Settings page, make an edit & hit save, it’ll take you back to the page or prospect you were last viewing).

Bugs & Drawbacks

There are some specific things, sorted by importance, that I jotted down when using the tool that I wasn’t a fan of.

Organization – there is no organized way of making sure you don’t contact the same site/person twice in different projects (with that said, they do now de-duplicate within a project). You can’t see what’s already been sent to specific prospects (without searching an inbox). The more you scale, the more this is an issue when you’ve got multiple clients, or just in general, multiple projects.

Viewing webpages in-app – while the viewing of webpages inside the app is a step up from other tools, it can still be fairly limiting. The main aspect (size of the viewed page) can be countered by having a large screen size, but if you’re on a laptop, it’s far from great.

Also, you can’t see the URL or the HTML page title of the page you’re viewing, unless you either hover over the link icon, or open the page in a new tab, respectively.

Adding opportunities in bulk – there is no way to bulk upload opportunities once a Website Import campaign has already been created (you will need to add them manually one-at-a-time).

Editing keyword lists – you can’t edit your keyword list after a campaign is created. You also have to have a Pro account for that campaign to get any new prospects into it after creation, and that only happens once a month. This, paired with the last bullet point, warrants a LOT of campaigns created, which creates a lot of noise the more you scale up.

Follow ups as new emails – automated follow ups are sent as new emails, not as replies to the original. Some may want this, but others may not.

Workflow Approval for Inspection – The Workflow Approval feature only applies for Personalization –> Compose. You can’t i.e. do this for one person inspecting, then another person approving those opportunities that they’ve qualified.

Sending opportunities backwards – Outside of the Workflow Approval for Personalization –> Compose, you can’t send opportunities backwards in the workflow. i.e. if you accidentally moved a few from Inspect to Personalization, can’t send them back. More so applies when only one person is working on a campaign.

Deleting sequence emails – You can’t delete any specific sequence emails in the list you see in the Compose section.

Editing sequence emails – You can only edit the first email in the sequence in the Compose section; for some reason there is no Edit button on the other emails in the sequence.

Other Platforms

I really wanted to talk in detail about more than just two options in this post. Notably, I also came across Ninja Outreach & Outreach.io, but I couldn’t highlight them as good choices after investigating them for these reasons:

Ninja Outreach ($25-29/user/month) – the newest tool provider. It still has a ways to go before it’s competitive from an outreach perspective. With that said, they do have some useful prospecting tools that are worth investigating.

Outreach.io (Enquire for Pricing) – great for what it does, but it only handles a small portion of the process (automates sending of initial emails & follow ups). Not an end-to-end tool beyond that (doesn’t help the start or end of the process).

If either two makes strides in the right direction, I’ll be (more than) excited to add a more extensive review of each to this post in order to keep it up to date.

With that said, let’s now get into a few noteworthy things from each of the above.

Ninja Outreach

Sections:

Introduction

As mentioned previously, this is the newest tool in the link building outreach landscape. It’s made strides, and a few are worth noting here. Below I’ll be talking about their web app (NOT their desktop app, which has a different interface & seems to have a few more features).

As a further note, the web app is ~4 months old as of this writing, and is rapidly improving.

Quick Look

Comparing their prospecting features against BuzzStream & Pitchbox’s, they’re definitely a step up. Starting with their Content Prospecting tool, they allow you to do keyword searches for bloggers & influencers based off what they’ve written about in the past.

As you can see, you’re getting a lot more than just a Google prospecting search, the results are instant, you can get up to 5000 results, and social metrics are included in addition to link metrics.

Their Social Prospecting tool provides a kind of result that the big 2 don’t provide at all.

You can search by Twitter or Instagram accounts, and their profile information is pulled into the results as well.

Whichever tool you use, you can add prospects individually or in bulk to a List. Below is an example list I created; here are the settings for a List.

If I wanted to view the prospects in the list, I can do so on the Your Prospects page. They’re displayed in the same way I found them in the Content Prospecting tool.

It’s worth noting that on the right-most column of that prospect table, they identify posts on their blog of certain opportunity types; i.e. when I clicked the ‘Giveaways’ link, it took me to a recent post on that blog that was a giveaway post (based off what looks like basic page title / URL footprints).

I can also get a quick overview of a specific prospect by clicking on the Settings icon at the bottom of each. The RSS tab is especially handy for looking over recent posts, and getting an idea on both the author name & the # of comments.

On their Templates page, they have 7 already created for you for various opportunities, and the template creation process allows for using custom variables, as shown below.

Finally, for their Outreach Mode, you can select a List, select a template, and then make the necessary edits to each email as you go. You can then send & go to the next in your list in one click.

There is a settings page, but the only thing currently available on it is to add email accounts to send from.

Beyond the web app, they also have a chrome extension that provides some basic info, discovered contact info, RSS items, and visitation data of the website you’re viewing. (The extension is actually free to non-users as well.)

One handy feature is their ability to pre-fill contact forms with templates upon visiting those pages & allowing it do so.

What Needs Work

With the above said, there are a few major things that need attention.

They have a Desktop version of their app, but it’s Windows only. It’s a bit scary to see a tool provider having a desktop version of the tool (there’s a reason all the other tools in this post are web apps), but I have been told that they will no longer be focusing on updating it, and will put 100% effort into the web app.

You can’t add an email account to send from if it’s not on Gmail / Google Apps (at least, on their web app; documentation shows you can use any email provider via their desktop app).

You can’t schedule emails at later dates.

Their list of relationship stages doesn’t seem to be editable. There are a few more than the below, but this makes up a fair amount.

You can’t view pages efficiently like you can within the app of Pitchbox or via the BuzzMarker extension for BuzzStream. This is important if you’re qualifying prospects beyond just metrics / website descriptions.

Outreach.io

Sections:

Introduction

Note: I was told hours(!!) before posting to remove pricing info, as they’re now going the enterprise route. You’ll have to enquire to find out pricing yourself.

This is a fairly new sales tool that can be used for link building, when used correctly. There are limitations given that it’s built for sales, but the overall good news is that this tool is fairly new as well, so I’m hoping for improvements in certain areas to make it more synergetic for marketers.

What this tool does is help you efficiently & effectively send out emails once all the appropriate data has been collected. It won’t help with the before (finding prospects + qualifying), or after (responding to emails, measuring success beyond response/open rates). With that said, for what they do, I think they do it better than any other in this post. So I’ll talk later about using it in conjunction with a CRM.

Quick Look

Even though it’s quite a specialized app, there’s a lot of details about it, so we’ll go through the main value adds that are worth noting for our purposes (I’m not going to be going through every tiny detail; see here instead). We’ll start with the best features for us.

The bread & butter of the app is what they call Sequences. Imagine dumping a bucket of prospects (with all the necessary data collected, i.e. emails + custom variables) into the top of a funnel that then does the following:

Waits 47 days, then creates a new task for the assigned user in Outreach to write a custom follow up, or put them into a new sequence, or to find new contact info, etc.

The above is just an example; you can get really customized with your sequence, and you can very easily A/B test templates at each ‘Step’ (and can easily toggle on/off individual ones in a sequence).

Here’s an example of a Sequence I setup.

In the above I’m testing 3 templates for the initial, then testing 2 for the first follow up, and using just one template for the third. I blurred out some of the email message, but I left in an example of how you can use conditional logic in templates, which is a big plus.

If a prospect replies back, then they’re considered “finished” and are removed from the Sequence so no more automatic emails are sent down the line.

In terms of the data you get back on your templates, it includes response rates, open rates & link click rates.

As with the other tools in this post, Outreach has its own version of a pipeline. They call their individual steps within a pipeline ‘Stages’. You can create your own set of custom stages as I have below.

One of the best features of this aspect of their app is that you can automatically move prospects into certain stages based off certain events. This can be done on an organizational level (your whole team), or based off a specific sequence. Let’s look at the settings for the latter.

As you can see on the right side in the above, if events happen such as the prospect gets initially added to the sequence / they’re emailed for the first time / that email bounces / the prospect replies / we never hear back at the end of the sequence, you can specify the Stage they’d automatically be put in.

Beyond that setting, you’ll notice a few more important ones on the left side of the above screenshot:

Delivery Schedule – similar to Pitchbox, you don’t set the specific time of a specific email, but rather setup weekly time intervals that are acceptable to send emails during (i.e. Monday 8am-5pm, Tuesday 2pm-5pm, Wednesday 1pm-2pm, Friday 8am-12pm).

Safety Settings – there are a handful of safeguards throughout the app to make sure you don’t do dumb things (i.e. two people on team emailing same person, not emailing a person too often in a time period, not sending an email if it has blank custom fields, etc.).

Throttling – since you’re sending based off a delivery schedule, this allows you to determine how many emails can be sent in a certain time period (i.e. no more than 50 emails should go out a day).

Beyond that, for what the app has, it’s very well built out. For example, importing via a CSV is quite easy & user-friendly, filtering prospects is very intuitive, setting up emails to send as isn’t much trouble, etc.

What Needs Work

To be honest, for what it’s trying to be (a sales app that integrates with a CRM), I didn’t see much opportunity for further improvement. I highly doubt they’re going to do any of the before parts (finding & qualifying prospects) or the after (inbox + link monitoring).

I did find two things I didn’t like, but don’t expect to change:

The chrome extension they have is based off people, not websites. So it works great when saving info of a profile on LinkedIn. Not so much when trying to save info of a blog you’re trying to pitch.

They have a limit of two email accounts per user. If you have email accounts for each client, if you’re a consultant who does outreach for 8-10 local clients, have fun paying potentially $400/month.

There were a few nitpicky things that I would want improved personally, but the main area that everyone would love is an API. I’ve been told an external version is supposed to be released by the end of September, but I haven’t seen any further updates in the weeks since being told that.

Best Uses

There are two use cases where I think this app can be leveraged:

As a full solution, given that prospects don’t need to be qualified, and that tracking data further down the funnel isn’t important. Not meant for this (they integrate with Salesforce for a reason), but an option.

Used in conjunction with a CRM.

I think the first is interesting, as the individual who introduced me to this tool doesn’t need to pre-qualify individual sites (the way he discovers them, they’re already qualified for what he’s pitching them), so for those who are in this segment and are only 1-5 person teams, this tool is definitely a full solution for you.

As for the second, thinking about things for me personally, I could see this as an interesting option. The tool is already setup to work seamlessly with Salesforce, with the thinking that you’d still need a broader CRM for your entire process (this is just for the sending of emails). But for other CRMs, given the BCC feature they have from an organization, user, template, or sequence level, you can have emails sent along to the CRM of your choice.

For my team, that would be BuzzStream (for Pitchbox users, unfortunately doesn’t act as a CRM). I could see the following happen:

Prospects are initially discovered using a specialty prospecting tool, or get added on the fly with the BuzzMarker.

Prospects are reviewed & personalization info is collected.

All that data is exported as a CSV, and imported into Outreach.io, which is BCC’ing our Buzzbox address.

They’re pushed into sequences, and as we hear back, we mark them as such within Outreach.io so their sequences stop.

A few things about this:

You’d give up the personalization of emails. This is big for me; we like to use templates as a base, then tweak individual emails from there; doesn’t really make sense to use this app for that (rather do it from the page with the BuzzMarker; also kills reason why we’d use this tool), but I believe there’s a way to do so.

Template testing data wouldn’t all be in the same place.

There would be a level of repetition when looking at stages between the two apps.

There are a few other tinier details that would have to be smoothed over, but nonetheless, I’ll be looking into this personally for my team a bit further, given there are certain segments of outreach that we could leverage for this.

Comparing Platforms

Given all of the above information, let’s now compare all of the platforms on each of their major sticking points. To state the obvious, the ratings given are purely my opinion.

Final Notes

This post was written in September, 2015. I hope to keep this updated with new product updates & new tools altogether.

If you have had any experiences with any of the above tools, I would love to hear about them in the comments below!

I’d been thinking about how we could prospect for social influencers in a way that was more data driven than the current approach of doing keyword searches on tools like Followerwonk.

An interesting feature of BuzzSumo was introduced to me a few weeks prior by AJ Ghergich (@SEO), a marketer that’s very talented when it comes to content promotion. He pointed out to me that you can see exactly which Twitter accounts shared a given piece of content, via the ‘View Sharers’ button next to each result.

This was very interesting, and thought it would be useful to simply grab a list of who shared a specific piece of content that was relevant, and add them to our prospecting lists.

However, on that Saturday night, I realized that this feature was much more powerful than that.

What we do, as with any other link building agency, is we look at where our client’s competitors were getting links. We’d then combine those reports together to see which specific pages were linking out to multiple competitors. Linking out to 3 or 4 of our competitors is a much stronger signal of being willing to link to us than those pages that only link out to 1 competitor.

So, I realized that night that you could apply this same methodology to the concept of who would be interested in sharing our content, utilizing this BuzzSumo feature.

If Joe Shmo shared 6 of the top 25 posts on this topic, then there’s a good chance he’ll be interested in my content on this topic too.

Generating A Report

So let’s break down the process:

1. Type into BuzzSumo the topic of the content asset you’re trying to promote.

2. Click the ‘View Sharers’ button for each result & Export that data.

3. Merge all of the resulting CSVs together into a single sheet. (I use Terminal. More info here, step #3.)

Make sure to delete the extra header rows before proceeding to the next step.

4. Use the =COUNTIF formula in Excel to see which usernames occurred most in the entire list. (More info here, step #5.)

Finally, de-duplicate the list based off values in the username column (column F).

What this is doing is taking, for example, those who shared 25 different articles on your topic, and seeing which Twitter users shared the highest number of those articles. So if Joe Shmo shared 6 of those 25, it shows their interest in the topic, and potentially that they’d be very interested in your content as well.

Here’s an example file based off the top 10 most shared articles on Link Building, sorted by our new column (I marked as ‘occurrences’):

Weeding Out The Bots

Before you’re good to go, it’s important to clean up the data by introducing some indicator of whether they’re a real person or a bot, seeing as there’s many accounts on Twitter that just endlessly tweet links.

Luckily, we’ve got a couple metrics already in our spreadsheet:

Reply Ratio – the % of tweets from that user that are replies.

Retweet Ratio – the % of tweets from that user that are retweets.

You’re never going to be able to perfectly determine if a user is a bot based purely off those two metrics. For example, you might think a low reply rate (<10%) indicates it’s a bot, but some influential accounts (i.e. @TechCrunch) don’t interact much on this level with their followers.
So, use the 80/20 rule if you’re just using these 2 metrics as aids. So for example, if they:

Then they’re probably a bot. Far from perfect, but you get the point. I haven’t perfected this criteria quite yet, but will report back when I do.

Use Cases

This process can help you generate qualified lists of social influencers that you could use for:

Custom audience Twitter ad campaigns for content promotion

Organic social outreach to get them to share your content

General identification of influencers for various campaign types (i.e. finding guest bloggers)

My team will be mainly utilizing the first two, given that this list was generated in a way that makes those two use cases perfect.

Yes, you could use this tactic for general identification of influencers, but I don’t perceive it as anymore useful than a tool like Followerwonk (with the exception of relevance qualification), given its main purpose is to see who’s sharing relevant pieces of content, as opposed to i.e. who’s creating relevant pieces of content.

Assessing Its Usefulness

To me, generating prospecting lists in this way does a much better job of relevance qualification than any single keyword could ever do. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel and go all Alchemy API on a user’s Twitter stream. You can simply just pre-qualify a list of related, highly shared articles, which is much less work.

It’s also important to note that in these data exports from BuzzSumo you have a plethora of other data, such as the websites of the various Twitter users, so if you’re a marketer with limited resources and can’t generate this data otherwise with your own tools, this is another advantage.

What do you think?

Would love to hear your feedback on the idea. We’ll be scaling it up internally as we begin to ramp up our content promotion efforts.

Note: Would also love to know if anyone has a way to do this without BuzzSumo; I don’t want this post to seem biased towards their tool, I just didn’t know of another way to get this data quickly, although truthfully I’ve barely investigated alternatives.

These brands want to tell people where they can buy their products, and in a lot of cases, they’ll list off online stores. When they do, they usually link. And if they’re to a brand category page on your target site, then there’s none more relevant you could possibly get (i.e. Acer linking to your Acer category page).

But when you’re dealing with 4+ figure number of brands that your target site carries, it can become a bit of a head scratcher as to how to scrape the very bottom of the barrel for these opportunities, seeing as you don’t want to leave any of these easy links on the table.

So, here’s how we scaled things. An overview:

Get the list of retailers your site carries

Find the websites of each retailer

Find any/all pages on those websites that could be a listings page

Grab extra data on these pages & combine data

Review those opportunities manually

Reach out

And here’s the detailed step-by-step guide.

Step #1 – Get The List

Ask your client, or management, for an entire list of the brands the site carries. Sometimes this isn’t easy to get, as the information isn’t readily available somewhere. But there’s usually a SQL database that could be queried to get it.

The most recent client we did this with also gave us a 2nd column in the spreadsheet detailing the “product category”. So for example, if it was Acer, the category might be “computers & electronics”. This is VERY handy for future steps, so if you can, try to get the categories of these different brands when possible.

Step #2 – Find Their Websites

Unfortunately, you’ll never get the list of brands upfront, along with where their websites are. You’ll have to do this yourself. But luckily, there’s one SUPER handy tool for finding them – Mechanical Turk.

Mechanical Turk is essentially a scalable workforce that you can outsource micro-tasks to. It’s the perfect platform for what we’re going to be using it for. In this case, we want someone to use Google to find a brand’s website.

If you don’t have an account, signup as a Requester. Then navigate to the “Create” tab, and hit “New Project”.

You’ll then setup a project, which in essence, is giving your workforce instructions on exactly what you’ll be asking them to do. In this case, it’s taking an input (the brand name), and then finding their website, if they have one.

Here’s an example of our instructions for our most recent client:

As you can see, our instructions are tailored to the client in that we’re also asking for them to find out how many of the brand’s products we carry on their site. This helps us figure out if we carry a lot, or a little. The more that’s carried, the more of a case we have to get the brand to list our client. If it’s i.e. only 1, then it’s much tougher to push hard in outreach, especially if it’s i.e. a shorter listing list for a major brand (i.e. 3M). We also look to see if we carry ANY at all, in case the list we get from the client in step #1 is outdated.

Anyways, below that list of instructions, the worker is displayed the following:

Notice the two inputs they’re given: Name & Category. When we “create a batch” for this project, what we’ll be doing is uploading a 2-column CSV for those two values (the list of brand names, and their product categories). You may only have 1 input (brand name) if you can’t get any more info on the brand.

(The reason we liked the product category input is because some brand names are generic, and there are multiple companies with it. Given the product category, the worker can tell whether or not the brand website they found is for the same brand that our client carries.)

Here are a couple other details about our project that are important:

Reward per assignment – $0.10. We could go lower, but no desire to. Cheap enough for what we’re wanting.

Worker requirements – this is in the ‘Advanced’ section of the Project settings. See below for what I use. From my experience, this is the best sweet spot of those that are high quality, and still cheap. Don’t go for the “Masters” qualification – you’ll significantly narrow down your list of qualified workers, and will have to pay more per hit, and batches will take a lot longer to finish.

Once you’ve got that setup, you’re ready to start a new batch on that project. For a batch of 2,000 for us, it usually takes ~3-4 hours to complete 95% of it. I usually queue them up the day before I need it finished, and just come back then.

(This is FAR from a perfectly detailed description of using Mechanical Turk. See this for more information. This is simply the bare minimum, and campaign specific details, you’d need.)

Step #3 – Find Listing Opportunities

Now that we’ve got the list of websites of all of the different brands, it’s time to identify pages on each of their sites that might be listings pages.

First, you’ll need to start with a list of title/URL footprints that are popularly used to describe these kinds of pages. Here are a few of my favorites:

“where to buy”

“our retailers”

“online retailers”

“find a dealer”

Ultimately, this is one area that I won’t be giving up COMPLETELY to you :). A bit of searching will reveal the rest.

We’ve ultimately nailed it down to 10 fairly broad footprints with words like in the above example. The reason we nailed it down to 10, is because of how many individual Google searches we’ll be conducting (scraping) for each brand website. I originally had 40, but narrowed it down to 10, for the reason you’ll see soon.

You’ll input the list of websites into the first text area, then you’ll input “site:” into the Prefix input, and finally the footprint into the Suffix input (with a space at the beginning).

Here’s what the output would look like for a single footprint:

You’ll then copy & paste this list of queries into an Excel spreadsheet, and then repeat the steps for each footprint you want to use.

When you’re finished, get the entire list of queries for all footprints into a single column in Excel, and sort it from A to Z. It’s not necessary, but I’ll explain why based off the tool I use for scraping Google.

Now that you’ve got this list of queries, it’s time to scrape Google for them. I personally use Link Prospector, and will be using it for this example.

With this tool, you can only scrape Google for 1000 queries at a time, so I suggest narrowing your list of footprints down to a smaller number (for me, 10), so you aren’t running an egregious amount of reports. For our client, we had 15k brands carried, so we had to generate 150 different Link Prospector reports (100 sites per report). It’s still high, but hey, it’s not 600 as it would’ve been with a 40 footprint list

(Thus, is the limitation of Link Prospector. If you’ve got other means to scrape Google at scale, use them for this!)

When you open up Link Prospector to create a new Custom report, here are the settings I’d go with:

I only scrape 1 page per query, but you could easily do 3 or 5 at no extra cost. We’re simply using queries that would turn up a relevant page, if there was one, in the first 10 results we got back.

From there, load up your report with 1000 queries, and then hit Submit.

(At the time of this writing, reports can take a bit to finish (~30 mins), but I’ve been told by Garrett French, the brains behind the tool, that this should improve as they load up more proxies.)

When the reports are finished, you’ve now got a list of pages for each brand domain that may be a listings page. We’re now going to find some extra info on each of those pages to see if they are, in fact, what we’re looking for.

Step #4 – Grab Extra Page-Level Data

So for that list of pages we’ve scraped from Google, we’re now going to be finding some extra info about them that will give us a better idea on if they’re what we’re wanting.

Here are the things we’re looking for:

Domain Name – for sorting/lookup value purposes.

External Links – to see if they’re linking out on the page. If i.e. <5, high chance it’s not what we’re looking for.

Page Title – Link Prospector supplies as well, but if you’re using other means, then grab this too.

You may have your own tools to find this info on a set of URLs, but I personally use URL Profiler for this. I’ll run the Server version on a Windows VPS overnight, depending on the number of results from Step #3.

Once we’ve generated the necessary reports for that info, it’s time combine all of the data we’ve got into a single spreadsheet. That means data from:

The original brand list

Mechanical Turk report

Link Prospector report

URL Profiler report

Here are the specific columns that we use in our finalized spreadsheet of all of those URLs of potential listings pages:

Column A – Brand Name. From the original brand list.

Column B – URLs. Each page scraped from Link Prospector.

Column C – Page Title. From the URL Profiler report.

Column D – External Links. Also from the URL Profiler report.

Column E – LTS. A metric from Link Prospector on how relevant the URL was to the queries entered for the report.

Column F – Domain. Not necessary in finalized report though. More so for combining data.

Column G – Product Category. This is client-specific, given in original brand list.

Column H – # of Products. Also client-specific, given in MTurk report.

Here are a few additional tips on the above:

Domain – grab the domain name of the URLs entered in the MTurk report, and the Link Prospector report, and use that column as the lookup value to combine the data.

LTS – for this number to be useful later on, make sure that all queries for a given, single brand website are in the same report, and not split up into two different reports. So i.e. if there were 30 footprints you had, having 15 for a single website being used in one report, and the other 15 in the other report, makes this score less useful. LTS is calculated by how many times a given result is found, and how highly its found, for the list of queries for that report.

External Links – your gut feeling is to just delete all rows of data with a value of <5. Don’t do this. With URL Profiler and other tools, this number can’t be found for some URLs, and a “0” is given.

On top of that, here is the custom sorting we did for manual review purposes for the next step:

First, sort column A, A to Z

Second, sort column D, Z to A

Third, sort column E, Z to A

What this is doing is first grouping the URLs together by the brand name, then sorts them from the highest # of outbound links on the page, and finally if they’re tied there, by the LTS score from Link Prospector (the higher the #, the more likely it’s a listings page).

Here’s an example of the finished product:

Now that we’ve got all the data as we want it, it’s time to review the opportunities!

Step #5 – Manually Reviewing Opportunities

It can definitely be a time-suck, but if you do want to extract as many of these opportunities as possible, WITHOUT reaching out to non-qualified prospects, you’ll have to go through the list manually.

Scan first few URLs & Titles columns – is there an obvious listing footprint? If so, is there a high # of external links on that page?

Scan LTS & External Links columns – are there other URLs in the list that are high in either of these #s? Do their titles/URLs warrant a page that might be a retailer listings page?

Visit a URL – after clicking on a link, do you see any clear footprints in the header or footer of the site (i.e. a “Our Retailers” nav link)?

If those 3 don’t yield anything worthwhile, then we ultimately move onto the next brand grouping.

Step #6 – Outreach

From here, it’s bombs away! Depending on your resources, if you’re able to get a client email address, I’d start with a simple email asking them if you could be listed. Keep it as concise as possible, give evidence of you carrying their products, and be polite.

If you don’t hear anything back after following up a few times, hit the phones. This is a perfect opportunity for phone-based outreach, as it’s the kind of opportunity where you should be listed (as opposed to could). We use Hushed in order to create a phone number that’s:

Not our outreach person’s personal cell #.

Of the area code of the client’s headquarters.

It’s also worth noting that some clients will have existing partner relationships that you can tap into internally. Getting them to put the calls through from a person the brand’s company is familiar with can skyrocket conversions, and also means less work for you :).

Conclusion

So how much did this all cost to do for a batch of 15,000 brands, using 10 footprints each for Step #3? Let’s do the math:

Mechanical Turk ($0.10 each) – $1,500

Link Prospector (7 credits/batch, $0.70/credit) – $735

Total – $2,235 ($0.15/brand)

I don’t have a number for you in terms of how many qualified prospects a batch like that would generate, but I do know that doing things at this scale & detail would mean, at the very least, an additional 50% or so links that you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten if you just went the competitor research route.

With that said, if you enjoyed the above post, then I’ve got great news for you: for the next 2 days, my Advanced Guide to eCommerce Link Building is open for registration. It’s only open to 100 more people before it’s closed for good (in order to protect the longevity of the information).

So what do you think? Are there any gaps in my process? I would love to hear about them in the comments below!

]]>http://pointblankseo.com/large-ecommerce-link-building/feed2428+ Stories of Failed Link Building Experimentshttp://pointblankseo.com/link-building-failures
http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-failures#commentsTue, 12 May 2015 15:21:05 +0000http://pointblankseo.com/?p=2783Find the original post on Point Blank SEO at: %%PostLink%%

At the heart of link building is attention to detail. If one item is out of place, then it could spell disaster for a campaign.

Therefore, it can be extremely helpful to learn what HASN’T worked. There are so many things that could go wrong, so it’s important to know what those things are, which is why I enlisted the help of some of the most brightest thinkers in the industry.

At the heart of link building is attention to detail. If one item is out of place, then it could spell disaster for a campaign.

Therefore, it can be extremely helpful to learn what HASN’T worked. There are so many things that could go wrong, so it’s important to know what those things are, which is why I enlisted the help of some of the most brightest thinkers in the industry.

The tactical takeaways from this post will be what things were overlooked, but ultimately, you’re getting a first-hand look at how great link builders think, which is invaluable in & of itself.

Here was the question:

“What link building experiment did you try that failed miserably? Why do you think it failed?”

1. I harvested Google for Australian bank accounts and then scheduled to pay
1 cent into the first hundred accounts with “SEO DEJAN” in the transaction description.

For one dollar I could buy targeted traffic comprised of one hundred bookkeepers, accountants, business owners and managers located in Australia. Basically anyone who has access to either the printed bank statement or online banking. Bonus effect is that I attempted to influence Google suggest so that when people start typing “SEO…” the suggest would come up with “SEO DEJAN”.

I thought my little guerrilla tactic would get some traction and publicity, scoring me links too, but the opposite happened. The whole thing backfired when I got a call from the manager at Commonwealth Bank of Australia investigating a complaint report from one of the recipients of my one cent thinking I was probing bank accounts to see which one was active in order to attempt extracting money from it. Apparently you are not supposed to make unaccountable deposits into trust accounts, which was an account type of the complaining recipient. Apparently they had spent days investigating and consolidating the transaction and after that sent me a pretty nasty letter threatening action if I should do another stunt like that in the future.

I’m so glad we haven’t done this on a large scale. It would have been a total Charlie Foxtrot.

2. When Geocities shut down we developed a crawler to examine all backlinks of now dead pages and have orchestrated a campaign of link repositioning to our own domains containing the content of the disappeared pages retrieved from the Wayback Machine. This got us a massive amounts of link juice, except that we never realised that a lot of webmasters who used to host their sites on Geocities moved to paid hosting with their own domain. We ended up getting tons of complaints and copyright infringement notices The nightmare lasted for over a month, after which we shut down the whole operation. I cringe when I think about it. What a stupid idea.

I had a client in the flooring industry and I asked one of the top linkbaiters of all
time if we could work together on one to see what we could make happen for this
guy. I can’t recall the exact idea but it was something like “Top 10 Best Floors in the Movies”. It did about as well as you would expect it to have done. I can’t really blame the link baiter. He was probably overloaded with offers to do stuff and this was a fairly low-budget affair. But I guess the lesson is don’t take every job that comes along…or something like that.

Wow. In the 15 years I have been doing link building, I have had MANY failures.
But I think this one takes the cake because it got my website hacked – they were so
angry.

I’m really into photography. And there was a time when I wanted a photography blog that I had created to do really well. This was around 2005 or so.

At that time, you could do extremely well with “ego-bait.” So, I created a post on my photography blog that broke down the “top 10 photography blogs on the planet.”

Now, I wasn’t actually looking for the best of the best… I only actually cared about who had the strongest link profiles and ranked for the most keyword phrases. Because, of course, I wanted my site to rank better… so I wanted higher authority sites… not necessarily the best ones.

So, I emailed the people that I included in my post and they were all excited and honored to be there. About 3/4 of them linked to the post and a month later, my site skyrocketed with rankings. I wish I still had the analytics charts… because they were awesome.

Here’s where I screwed up. I told the very story that I’m telling you right now on my personal blog…. and… yup… the photographers saw it and were PISSED.

One of them was rather wealthy and had a large following of folks that he shared the story with. One of his followers was a black hat hacker… and he hacked my photography blog.

I logged into my site one day and every single photo on my photography blog was changed to some weird Japanese anime image.

He also told all of the other photographers that were mentioned. They promptly removed the links from their sites… and within a few months, the traffic had gone back to normal.

I lost some serious credibility in the photography community after that… and learned a valuable lesson. Don’t talk about what you do if it works well… which makes me the “Anti Jon Cooper.”

So it’s been some time since I’ve personally done link building work, so here’s a
story from a veteran link builder on our team:

“I once did a massive cold call outreach which was unsuccessful.

I came up with around 30 search strings to find blogs to pitch guest posts for. I input them one by one into SERP Scraper, copied the first 100 results for each string into an excel sheet (so I had around 3000 sites in total). I mass input it to URL Profiler and got the names and contact info. URL Profiler gives you contact info back for around 40% of the sites you input, which means it gave me back around 3000 x 40% = 1200 emails.

I mass pitched them all through a single mail merge. URL Profiler does not give you names for all of the emails it finds, so many of the 1200 approx emails it did find for me were without names. So approx 1200 emails had been sent without checking whether those sites were relevant to the post I was pitching, without checking if the emails were correct and without pulling names for all.

I initially thought atleast half of them would be relevant as they were appearing for very specific search strings I had made and so worst case scenario, I’d get at least a 5% response rate which would lead me to 1200 x 5% = 60 links. For minimum effort that spanned maybe 30 minutes max, 60 links would be a huge win. But in the end, only 8 sites replied back.

What I learned from that was that tools are great but can only do so much. Manual sorting is very necessary and mass cold pitches that are not customized don’t get you far.”

This was maybe 2009, and I was trying to put together an offline event for a
group of influencers in my client’s niche. I’m pretty sure it was the first event I had
ever put on so I was completely going into this thing blind. Plus, I was running this remotely from my client’s location. (In hindsight, I have no idea why I thought this was going to work.)

The whole premise was to target a subset of bloggers in my client’s location, get them to come out and experience this event, and then ultimately blog about it with links back to the client for hosting/setting it up. Outreach was great; I had about 20 influencers committed, and they were super excited to be included. So I got all the logistics set up, and I was feeling pretty good.

Except the day of the event, it rained. Only 6 of the 20 bloggers showed up. They didn’t know where to go. My client was 30 minutes late showing up. And of course, I didn’t even think to give anyone my number (or gasp: be there in person) to help coordinate everything. Total fail. I got maybe 1-2 content pieces published out of it and not exactly glowing reviews.

Last summer we reached out to 20,000 realtors with a pitch for a piece of high-
utility evergreen content.

We got 2 links.

Ouch!

We had earned links previously from 10-20 realtors by pitching local, high-utility content and we believed in them as a prospect group. We wanted to scale up our efforts so we created more high-utility (non-local) evergreen content that we hoped would be applicable.

Here’s why we think our rates were so low:

As a group realtors are not website/publishing savvy

We didn’t understand their website audience(s) sufficiently

Realtors have low perceived value of publishing non-sales-driving information to their website

Realtors are BUSY ($$$ or gtfo)

We failed to recognize the importance of geography to realtors as linkers

A core strategy of ours used to be developing infographics on our websites (and clients) which was a gold mine for links from being embedded in blogs with custom descriptions / introductions, referenced as further insights on a topic / expert advice and one of them even being featured within a TV News Report. However, all of a sudden our response rates began to decline dramatically and interest in ‘single image / graphic content’ almost disappeared – this was around the middle of 2013.

Upon evaluation at the time, it seems as though there were a couple of elements that created the demise of ours (and others) strategy:

Other SEO’s not providing infographics of a high quality, meaning that anything that mentioned ‘graphic’, ‘infographic’ or ‘super awesome information with high quality references – ALL IN JUST ONE IMAGE’ were instantly tagged as ‘spam’ to any website that has a strong audience or boasts quality content.

This is definitely an example of how the link building playing field constantly changes based on specific strategies becoming common knowledge (and spamable), technology advancements (eg, mobile usage) and just how your target audience can instantly put up their personal firewall on specific strategies due to others wasting their time.

Nowadays, for us, it is all about ensuring strategies are always unique and that they meet a lot of internal ‘future proofing’ criteria to ensure that we do not get smacked by similar issues again. For example, instead of completely scrapping Featured Infographics, we expanded the strategy to be focused on ‘Content Assets’, creating engaging content, compiling images that compliment the piece, ensuring a mobile friendly (responsive) layout and showing great value to any high quality site.

Buying Expired Domains and Ranking Them….Ok so let me start by saying I’ve
had quite a bit of success with this method, but my story is about my failures, some
really expensive ones.

I was first beginning my hardcore journey into domaining and aggressively buying expired domains to rank as opposed to setting up brand new sites. With a decent bank roll to work with (this was around penguin 1.0 early 2012) my plans was to use my skills to invest in domains and web properties instead of something like the stock market. With the knowledge in hand already, it seemed like the logical place for me to invest.

But here is the problem I ran into, I paid wayyyy toooo much for some of the domains. Two specific examples, one domain was $2600 and the other was $1500.

Prior to that I had swooped a domain for ~$500 and it was a huge win, just crushing Google traffic and the plan I rolled out for the site was working phenomenal. Then I had a couple other domains I spammed links at and they responded very well, at this point I thought I had discovered fire for the first time.

Truth is looking back, I think there was a good bit of luck involved.

So depending on how you look at it, maybe I did alright and bought *enough domains to hit a winner, the losses being part of the game, gambling of sorts.

But it wasn’t all perfect execution on my part, which leads me to the fail miserably part of this question. The $1500 domain had a friggin’ penalty, yup, even my “skilled” analysis missed some sketchy history. Learned my lesson there though, man you really have to go insane mode checking EVERYTHING when prospecting domains. Check every last snapshot in archive.org to make sure some spammer like myself hasn’t already gotten to the domain.

Boom, out $1500 right there. It doesn’t end there though, I spent easily another $1500 on that same project, ~20 hours developing, and ~$300 for a logo. Yeah you can see where this could get pretty bad. Then I sat there watching the rank tracker wondering why the hell every initial ranks were terrible and no movement came after that. Bad times, definitely bad times.

The other fail was a whopper at $2500, now this one didn’t have a penalty jut really didn’t rank that much better than a new domain. So yes it had a crap load of links and looked amazing on paper, but it didn’t do anything spectacular once I threw up some content and targeted some keywords. For that kind of cash you better be crushing the SERPs damn near out of the box.

I learned the hard way how crucial prospecting is if you’re considering investing in a domain that’s anywhere over a couple hundred bucks. Then again, I managed to swoop one really kick ass domain I’m running successfully today. This is still a really powerful tactic, just be patient and don’t make the same mistakes I did.

We have had some creative ideas in the past which were not passed by legal at large companies I’ve worked in, tho these ideas might be ok for smaller companies tho.

Usually you might suggest a few link building ideas to a client and then the client will pass them off to legal for approvals, well this is how large clients do business.

This one idea we had when I was working at a telco was to make a “non-branded” micro site and basically call it the “Official Australian Mobile Phone Day” and then you use a 3rd party persona to reach out to all your competitors and get them to link back to the mobile phone day website and make some PR around it.

Now once the mobile phone day has “died out” and people have forgotten about the website you then 301 the site back to a money page on your site and instantly you have links from all your competitors. Cheeky idea tho you can adapt this to any business really.

This was one idea we had tho it got knocked back by legal because we would probably end up getting sued.

The site I was working on back then was in the online gambling industry (online bingo) – wherein majority of their players are older people.

So we’ve listed all the holidays in the entire year that’s related to their target audience (you’ll actually be surprised to see that there’s one or two in every month of the year). We’ve scheduled and ran different promotions and specials for each holiday.

However, despite the thorough planning and execution, the process I’ve designed for this type of outreach campaign still failed (but I still believe that this is very doable). The problems we’ve unexpectedly encountered – but should really have:

Time – it’s a very time-sensitive type of campaign, wherein you’d also have to deal with the publishing schedules of the blogs you’re looking to help you promote your site’s holiday-based events. You must do outreach months before the actual event to really ensure that you’ll get ton of exposure to it – and on time.

Budget – we approached hundreds of mommy blogs (and other blogs we’ve found promoting/writing about the holidays we’ve chosen to build our events/promos around). Since my client was in the online gambling space, most of these blogs charged a bit more than their usual rates to get the promos featured. Weighing which prospects to pursue and invest our budget burned a lot of time.

If ever I get the chance to do this kind of campaign again, I’d definitely do it right next time.

I once used a clients airline miles to buy an all expense paid trip for a family to
go to Disney Land. We targeted mom bloggers and told them to write about the
contest on their site in order to be entered. We got somewhere around 40 LRDs… and nothing happened. Rankings didn’t move at all. My thinking is the lack of relevancy to the client’s vertical (health supplements) didn’t help us in the SERPs. It was a pretty gigantic waste of time.

It’s actually pretty tough to think of one failed attempt that stands out, but there
were certainly plenty of mistakes in the early days. Thinking back to my first ever
attempts at link building, I remember feeling pretty confused about what to do. There was so much information out there, and every single article seemed to contradict another. I’d guess my first mistake was simply not getting started on *something* soon enough.

When I ran my first ever site, I used to get amazing editorial links by buying cheap advertising as a ‘way in’ to the editorial teams. That worked a treat for a little bit, but clearly wasn’t sustainable as the ad guys just got pissed off with me buying £20 ads in the classifieds. There were plenty of other mistakes too – buying too many directory links in one go and getting my wife’s domain penalized probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do.

We have an internal bit of banter here. When someone’s about to do something big, it’s ‘Good luck Geoff – don’t fuck it up!’. Truth is – if you’re too worried about making mistakes, or trying something that doesn’t work out, then you’ll never get started on anything at all. So I’d say the biggest mistake anyone can make is just not cracking on and testing something out.

I was working on a client and decided to totally switch up the outreach email that
I usually used as we were focusing on a new product and I felt like I needed to do a
much more personalized email. It totally bombed. In fact, out of close to 30 emails I sent out, no one responded. I didn’t even get responses to say “heck no” or “take me off your list you cow!”

Here’s why I think it failed: it was too much. I had three paragraphs where I usually just had a few sentences. I wanted to try and make a connection between the product I was marketing and specific content on other websites but in trying to do that, I think I just turned everyone off. I’m wordy anyway so my attempt to get more personal became about as overly wordy as this answer is. Usually I at least get SOMETHING back and out of 30 emails I’d have expected 6 responses with maybe 3 turning into actual links, but nope, I blew it.

The lesson here is that you CAN get too personalized in your outreach. I gave it all away because I thought it might be easier than going back and forth for 5 emails but I think the email was a TLDR and just got deleted within seconds of reading it.

I pitched a discount program meant to target bar associations. The client’s
business was related to B2B financial services and it made a lot of sense for
attorneys and firms to use the client’s service. I had past experience with EDU and other discount programs that worked great. So, I did the outreach, and I soon learned something about professional organizations like bar associations – they only have a handful of revenue streams, and charging sponsors to offer a discount happens to be one of them. They’re called affinity programs, and they’re not cheap if you want to do one with every bar association in the country. We were able to cut the effort off fairly quickly after learning this, and did manage to get a couple links from associations which did not charge to offer a member benefit, but I had a major foot in my mouth after my confident assurance that this program would work wonders for the client.

The second lesson that came out of this is that even a new client will forgive a mistake like that in exchange for your honest assessment that you need to move on to the next opportunity. We’ve had that client over 3 years and have since run a number of successful content and link development efforts.

All failures come with lessons and that’s incredibly relevant within SEO. It’s better
to test something to see if it works than to not try at all. It’s not always that easy when you’re working on client accounts, but if you let them know of the risks in advance then you’ll be fine. The alternative, and much safer approach, is to test everything on yourself first (I’d recommend this where possible).

One of the failures that comes to mind is from a number of years ago now for a client that I worked with in the UK. They were an AV distributor and we were looking to drive some links through to some of their key product pages.

As part of the strategy, I wanted to run a blogger day as part of a wider event. We would get 10-20 bloggers down to the evening event that we were running and supply them with blogger packs that included product samples, freebies and a USB with loads of imagery, etc. loaded up onto it.

As part of the agreement, we asked the bloggers to do write-ups on their respective tech blogs, including some video blogs at the event where they could get hands-on with the products. This would have been amazing, I’m sure and would have bagged us a ton of great links.

The only thing was that there was a slight admin error and the travel for the bloggers was booked on the day after the event, completely missing it and it was too late to sort it out… oh dear.

One technique I tried recently was finding and reporting Viagra spam pages on
high DA sites. I had a good list of .edu domains and I would Google “site url + viagra”
(or cialis etc). If anything was found it means that the site had been hacked and someone had added spam pages to it. Happens to a lot of .edu domains unfortunately. If I located a spam page I would contact the site and let them know.

More often than not, I received absolutely no reply. Its like they didn’t understand what my email was trying to tell them. Even if I explained it like “Did you know your site has been hacked and you are advertising Viagra?”, they still don’t treat it likes its critical problem.

Not sure if I’m allowed to give examples but here’s one site that was hacked pretty bad:

You would THINK that a site would be alarmed and want to fix the issue. This particular site’s response to me was “it’s not an immediate problem and all the students are in exam season, our Director of IT will be looking into/resolving the issue when he’s done his exams”.

Its hard to then ask for a link when they don’t even see the favor you just did for them.

I think this technique has a low success rate because a) the people who receive the email have no idea what you’re talking about and b) schools are busy places with a lot of red tape and departments.

If I was going to try this technique again, I might just start by emailing the Dean/Principle/President of the school directly as they are likely someone who would take immediate action.

Our goal was to chase press mentions. So we implemented a local link building
strategy where we could go and chase press mentions in local news and articles that featured direct quotes and request backlinks to specific local pages from them.

We had long-term success with our client over the span of 14 months, with response rates ranging between 40-50% and between 20-30% conversion rates. Then one month, we saw a drop in mentions, and in an effort to maintain our KPIs, we replaced the word “link to us” with “attribution” in our outreach. It was an innocent misuse of a word that has unique contextual meaning in the PR world.

In short, a personal phone call was made by the journalist to the quoted party of the story, a PR executive for the company we worked with. It resulted in the PR exec shutting down our campaign (as she had no idea it existed). Organizations need to ensure that the PR and SEO teams work closely together and communicate all campaign initiatives. This PR exec didn’t know we had been given a “community” email address from their company, who we were, or why we were reaching out to these link opportunities.

We learned that just keeping the SEO team happy wasn’t enough in this case and should have ensured the PR team knew what we were doing. Now our most low hanging fruit opportunity is gone due to a can of worms that one word brought out.

As hard as it is to admit, I’ve had countless link building projects fall flat on
their face. Most of the time, I can tie it back to the content not being engaging or
interesting enough. For example, a lack luster infographic.

However, my worst experience was with a large scale outreach campaign. We were managing roughly a couple hundred bloggers in the same niche. They were all going to push their reviews of our product at the same time. The idea was that by all of them talking about our product at once we had the potential to get the brand heavily saturated in it’s target niche… That is not what happened at all.

Very few bloggers stuck to their timeline. They were posting their reviews at any moment they pleased despite agreeing to certain time frame; some posted their reviews months later. The bloggers also told several people in their networks that we were giving product away for a review, but we had already reached our cap. This offended several bloggers in the niche, who later negatively commented on posts. Additionally managing the process of getting the product to 200+ bloggers was an absolute nightmare.

We did still get several links, but we never got this sort of megaphone effect we were hoping for. However, the biggest loss, was time. All of us fell so behind on other projects, because this one campaign was consuming all our spare time.

That being said, I do think this strategy could work for the right niche and product. However, I’d definitely be hesitant to try anything like that again.

When I think back to this it stings more than the bucket of dirty dead river fish
water that got flung in my eyes whilst water fighting in Thailand last month.

My most traumatic link building experiment happened two years ago. I’d just published an expert roundup about local SEO and thought I’d try pitching link prospects with a 60 second Snapchat style video. I think the service I used was VSNAP. Can’t say for sure though because I’ve intentionally tried to eradicate every memory of this out of existence!

Before I tell you what happened, I’d just like to add that this went down at a time when my online endeavours weren’t making jack sh*t. I was struggling to make money online and losing hope in ever being able to move out of my parents house.

So as you can imagine…it wasn’t the best time to get a bucket of fish water chucked in the eyes!

Sure, the video actually got A LOT of views. The stats showed that 60 people or so opened the email and watched it. Thing is…only three people replied and their responses were soul destroying.

One simply said “WTF?!”. Another said “Dude…not cool”, and another said “Sorry but we don’t do business like this”.

Long story short, I didn’t upgrade to the VSNAP premium service

That experience actually shook me so hard I almost gave up on blogging.

To sum up, I wouldn’t recommend using video emails to link beg. Instead only use video to connect with someone in a fun way and to simply strike up communication. It is good for that because it does make you stand out and is way WAY more personal than email.

But…never send a complete stranger a video of yourself in a dark room, pretending you know who they are, what they do and with a fake smile and a hint of desperation in your voice, ask them for a link. Just don’t!!!

My biggest failure came early on in my career as an SEO. You see, I failed to
understand that when you are aiming to build links, and there is more than one
person involved (i.e you!) then shit can go wrong. The idea itself was spectacularly simple. The brand I was working for at the time had a major TV commercial going live, which we KNEW would go nuts – it was a single spot buy and during a highly watched UK TV show. It was just that good – and considering the interest it would generate there was no way I was going to miss out an opportunity to garner a few links. So I built a fairly detailed plan.

We built a staging area that would go live the minute the advert aired and would be linked to from the home page.

The area would have a number of assets that would be worth linking to for example:

We created a “Making Of” video that we would use to further interest in the campaign.

A back story behind the campaign and comments from people involved.

A code embed that would allow people to embed assets from the campaign such as images and stills

A series of out take videos.

Assets for affiliates to distribute on their own websites

The plan was to publish the campaign as soon as the advert started airing, supported by a press release which would link to the assets page so that media that would be reporting on the campaign would have a resource to link to. Sounds great right? It failed.

It failed because there were too many moving parts and I just didn’t take enough responsibility. Here are the errors that caused the failure:

I was due to be on holiday 2 days before the advert went out, so I had to plan everything to run while I was away.

Although we built a staging area, and tested it – the devs messed up and when the campaign went live – all the links on the page were broken because they were pointing to “staging.website.com”. Suffice to say that no one was around at 9pm on a Friday to fix the issue, as the agency was closed. Someone did manage to fix the area, but it was Sunday afternoon.

The code embed seemed to work – unfortunately the links were to “CDN.staging.website.com” instead of the target URL. It was too late – see next point.

Affiliate pre-populated email and assets went out within hours of the TV show. Guess what? because the affiliates had access to materials we wanted the public, media and bloggers to have access to on our site, they benefited – because our stuff wasn’t working.

The press release went out with the HOMEpage URL instead of the landing area we so painfully built – no incentive for media to link to. In fact – a resourceful affiliate sent out his OWN press release with links to his assets page – and gained about 40 links in 24 hours.

In total we guessed we lost 3 weeks work, and about 200 odd links (judging from the links our affiliates got cause of their “coverage” of the campaign).

What I really learnt was – if you want to be an effective link builder, don’t leave ANYthing to chance – you have to almost be a control freak. Link building on auto pilot is only for spammers – if you want to run campaigns – you have to micro manage every part of them if there are too many moving parts. Most of all – don’t go on holiday just before a campaign launches.

The most common link building failure we run into is projecting subject matter
expertise for a client who doesn’t have it built in naturally to their branding,
even if the content is good.

For example we might pitch something on electricity for a non-electrical-focused client – if they sell maybe one or two green-friendly items they’re trying to push – but because the client isn’t a vertical expert, it tends to overall perform worse than subject-matter content, even if specific and really well done.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t ever push content slightly outside your perceived subject matter expertise, but if you do, you’re immediately starting from a position of distrust you have to root yourself out of, and that should be evaluated as a risk factor when entering the arena.

As a programmer, I am always looking to have machines do the work for me.
I’ve long been an advocate of broken link building so I decided to do a personal
experiment with a fully automated process, pushing the technique to its limits. The idea took this form…

Crawl the web to find links to 404’d PDFs.

Extract the latest copy if that PDF from archive.org

Display that PDF in an HTML5 viewer (so the links point to a page not a pdf)

Download all the backlinks to those 404’d PDFs from the APIs of Moz, Majestic and Ahrefs.

Extract the webmaster contact info for all of those backlinks

Email them automatically to fix the broken link with my new HTML version

So, I strung together a handful of APIs and hit go.

It worked. It worked well. It worked too well. Even in a single-threaded version, links were pouring in from everywhere, including EDUs and GOVs. The site was acquiring 200+ root linking domains daily on autodrive and I was receiving countless thank you emails from the webmasters for helping them out.

And then I tweeted about it – not the domain name, just the success. It was less than 24 hours before the site was deindexed and I had an email in my inbox from Matt Cutts asking what was going on. It turns out mass copyright infringement isn’t Google’s favorite thing, especially when used to power a link building scheme. I explained that it was an experiment and pulled the site down. It is still down to this day and will drop in the next couple of months.

In retrospect, I did some stupid stuff and the site got what it deserved. The biggest takeaway, though, was that you should block your experiments with robots.txt. If you are testing new link acquisition methods, you should do so in an environment that does not actually influence the search results. Until you have established the technique as white hat, your best bet is to play it safe behind the protection of robots.txt. Finally, the human element can’t be divorced from good link building. The more automatic, the more risk.

I’ve had tons of failures over the years, recent ones are based on creative ideas I
thought were awesome but unfortunately no one else did, others worked well until
Google completely destroyed them.

I think the biggest error I ever made was based around directories, we all know they worked well historically but I implemented this just before the full force of Panda/Penguin descended on the landscape. I had a client with tons of locations and equally as many individual small websites, so I decided the best idea to acquire links would be to find 4-5 locally relevant directories for each location, and manually submit to each one (yeah I know, manual). I didn’t use dodgy anchor texts, the directories were all real and had genuine quality guidelines so there was no reason why this wouldn’t work. Unfortunately 3 weeks later Google begin to deindex all these directories in mass and the links that were now in place were completely useless.

The project took around a month to complete and was a fair investment for the client, so this was a painful lesson to learn.

Another slightly different mistake was some link removal work I did. My blog had naturally collected links over time, but I had paid for 10 site wide links on some high PR websites (this was 2008). These links worked well, I was driving tons of traffic and even service enquiries, however I was worried that these links would get found and the site would eventually be penalised. I decided to remove the paid links and all my rankings dropped off a cliff, I didn’t expect such an impact so I quickly got the links live again 2 days afterwards but it was too late, the removal of the links obviously flagged something up at Google’s end and I was under penalty for 2 years. I would have been better off getting a manual penalty and using the disavow tool.

Nearly 5 years ago I was just beginning to build out our US based link building
team so there was plenty we’d yet to learn on how to finesse the prospecting and
outreach. We were just getting started with one of the oldest and biggest brands of hearing aids I’ll refer to here as BRAND X. As none of us had any experience or knowledge with hearing aids we did some simplistic brainstorming to develop the personas we would be targeting. Our lengthy process went something like this:

1. Who wears hearing aids? – People with a hearing disability.

Done. Find them all and email them.

Had we spent a little more time developing the personas we would have discovered that while senior citizens who are hard of hearing tended to have a strong affinity to BRAND X, every one else with a hearing disability despised BRAND X with a passion.

Example of an angry response from our link building CRM….

Subject: up yours

Other replies were more verbose and politely explained our faux pax.

That cartoon granny remained taped to the office wall for years as a hilarious reminder to spend a little more time on those personas.

It wasn’t really an experiment, it was more like a small part in a larger link
building campaign that was a complete disaster. We created a small site (around 25
pages) about studying abroad in one country in particular. We hoped to build quite some .edu and .gov links to the domain. This way, we could use the authority of the domain to build links to our clients website, but also to link out to pages on other sites that linked to our client. Getting (indirect) university and government links to both our client and their links sounded like a great plan, but it completely failed. Even though the website had a great, governmental-looking design and solid content, and we sent out quite a few properly written emails, it only attracted a handful of links.

I think it failed for a couple of reasons. First, most of the universities and governmental entities we contacted thought it was their job to inform their students about studying abroad, and not someone else’s. Instead of linking out to our site, some of them simply upped their own game and improved the content on their site. Also, our micro site lacked a proper ’About Us’-page., We couldn’t tell a fluffy story about some kind of non-profit rainbow pony organization that created the site. We didn’t want to lie (it was a commercial company behind the site), so we kept the About Us page fairly basic. We tracked the visitors that came to the site via our outreach emails and analysed their visits. Lots of them aborted their visit on our About Us-page, much more than we expected.

It still frustrates me that this approach didn’t work out (at all!), since I expected quite a lot from it.

My biggest failure is when I started an infographic site (can you tell this was a
few years ago?), and figured I would do broken link building with infographics that
had been moved or taken down.

I found an infographic a lead gen site had made that had been posted elsewhere, and linked to from a Google Sites site from a librarian that was about infographics. I picked up the infographic, put it on my site, and sent her an email, letting her know I’d fixed the link and she could link to my site.

I got in return an extended screed about copyright law and how I couldn’t just pick things up and put them on my site, and she said that she’d never link to my site or anything I do bc I didn’t adequately respect an infographic from a lead gen site’s copyright.

A few years ago, a colleague of mine was doing some link building outreach and
accidentally used the subject line “link request” after forgetting to change the subject
line from a template I’d reviewed. Weirdly, it actually worked because he followed up straight away and apologized for the subject line – this actually led to him getting a few links!

I tried to replicate this on a freelance client of mine where I was trying to get links to a piece of content they’d built. I emailed maybe 15-20 bloggers and didn’t get a single positive reply! There were only a couple of replies mixed between straight rejections and people asking for money. Suffice to say, I didn’t try this method again!

So I thought I had come up with the most clever play off of broken link building:
creating a fake “broken link” non-profit/startup to use as a single persona for all
broken link outreach.

The organization’s goal was “to try to cure the Web of broken links”, and cited evidence of the problems it’s solving (i.e. in the court of law, a lot of web links to .gov domains are breaking all the time, so past case information is becoming outdated when they cite certain documents).

Once outreach started, however, the idea fell apart. Turned out, these site owners didn’t want my follow up recommendations for link suggestions, as they didn’t perceive me as a subject matter expert. So they may fix the links, but not add any additional ones I suggested, one of which would be the client. Which basically ruined the point of doing the whole thing.

In hindsight – yes, it could work if we only did direct-replacement. But even then, response rates were far from great. Coming off as a tech-savvy persona is usually not ideal for this kind of outreach; instead, go for more of the “casual web surfer” persona to deliver the best results (from what I’ve found).

After a few decent successes with creating linkable content assets for one
of our e-Commerce clients and receiving some great coverage for them we were
quite excited with our next piece which was an interactive map showing where you can charge your mobile device.

When coming up with linkable content for clients we try to make sure that we can cover a number of different use cases especially if we want to create something evergreen. We thought that this map would do that after all how often do you see people complaining about their smartphone battery life. We also added filters to show places that also had free Wi-Fi. If you allow your browser to share your location with the map you can then receive directions to the nearest charger to you.

Why the content didn’t quite capture the attention we had hoped for:

We had anticipated that businesses would add their own locations to the map and hopefully increase footfall to them

Many people on social media did not see the map as something useful for them as they lived in these cities already & knew where these places were

The map became quite cluttered as we added lots of large coffee chains

The content was very US/UK centric as these were the main cities we covered first

Despite all this the map was quite an easy piece to create and the biggest cost was the time invested in adding the initial locations. Even though the map didn’t quite capture the mainstream attention we had hoped for we did manage to pick up a few dozen good links for the client and there are future opportunities to promote this piece to tourist boards, universities and hotels etc.

One of my most spectacular link-building learning opportunities had to be when
I formulated a plan based around sending outreach emails to about 500 university
admins in the .edu space. Prior to outreach, I had hired a crack writer and graphic design team to create a piece of killer content that was one of the only authoritative guides of its kind. I assumed that, since the content I was promoting was of such high quality and highly useful to university students, this campaign would be a slam dunk, but like most newer link-builders, I quickly learned that even the best campaigns can be quickly laid to waste by even the smallest of details.

The detail in this case happened to be school vacation. I sent out our targeted and personalized email outreach at the end of December and were immediately swamped with a deluge of “Out of the office” messages. It turns out that when the students leave the university, so do the professors and staff. The 8 responses I received out of our 500 hand-crafted emails rapidly taught me the value of background research, and the importance of timing. Now I always make sure to check school schedules before I send out an email blast.

My top experimental/blackhat link building fail was back in 2008. I had a non
paying client that owed me around US$4K and found out he had not paid other freelancers
and was getting a lot of link building for free. I decided it was time for revenge and bought a very similar domain name with better branding and pointed it at his domain so it resolved at his site. The next stage was to outreach to all his top linking sites and tell them ‘we are rebranding and please change our links to the new domain’. The plan was to then 301 all the stolen link juice to one of my affiliate sites.

Yes it worked very well, but one of the webmasters smelt something fishy and emailed him. I then quickly received a letter from a solicitor threatening to sue me and thought it was time to stop, even though they had no hard evidence it was me. Moral of story, don’t do any ‘experimental’ link building that can get you in trouble!

About four years ago, I helped launch a link building campaign that was targeted
at food bloggers. The campaign seemed pretty simple. We were going to host a recipe
contest, where a food blogger would post a recipe creation on their own site (like they normally do) and feature an ingredient that the client sold. The blogger would link one of their ingredients to a product the client carried as well as link to the official recipe contest page as a method to declare their entry in the contest.

We thought this would work well for a few reasons. The barrier to enter seemed very low. These bloggers are posting recipes on their site everyday, they would simply need to incorporate one of the many common ingredients the client sold.

We assumed the campaign would have enough built in virality to spread, reducing the amount of outreach we needed to get it to take off. One blogger sees another bloggers entry, and then decides to enter it themselves.

We launched the contest, with a $200 gift certificate for the winner. We sent outreach to our target list of 20 bloggers we had worked with before. Bloggers we thought would be likely to enter and get the contest rolling.

The end result was not pretty. We got about 8-12 total submissions and links. Almost entirely from websites that were previously linking to us. Our failure to build our own outreach list to target new sites was a major problem. This was before Facebook and Twitter Ads were an option and heavy outreach was needed for it to succeed. By the time we realized this wasn’t going to work out, the contest’s 4 week window was coming up quick.

The concept was good but our poor execution resulted in it being a link building failure.

I had a client that was in the personal gifting space, and this campaign was
around the holiday season. Trying to avoid exchanging product for a link, I thought
it would be creative to send a product to bloggers with no prior correspondence, sort of like a Secret Santa. I obtained addresses via a WhoIs lookup, and was able to find about 25 bloggers within the client’s niche that met our linking metrics. After sending the product out, I anxiously waited for the links to start showing up. Unfortunately, they never did. While I did receive some social media coverage for the client, I received a couple inquisitive emails along the lines of “Thanks for the gift, but ummm how did you get my address???” While the WhoIs lookup is technically public information, it’s not exactly the easiest thing to try and explain to a complete stranger, and definitely not a great look for the client.

Now that the days of exchanging product for a review + link are over, it’s a very thin line to walk when dealing with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. While I think I may have been on to something with my idea, the approach and execution could certainly use some refinement. At least I didn’t get any responses like what Tony and Richard received!

Many many years ago, in an elaborate attempt to get .EDU links in rapid scale –
I built a slick technology website that claimed to build the best student blog hosting
solution available, at no cost. I then did outreach to IT Directors at universities, and essentially packaged WordPress MU (multi-user) install on their servers, to allow students to setup their own self-hosted blogs on the sites. In return, I would have admin access to create as many (or as little) blogs as I wanted. Note: The school would benefit from providing blog access to students, and I was providing my time to set it up at no cost. It was a win-win for everyone.

Did it work? It actually worked, and I got a university to give me a site! I was given a sub, sub, sub, sub-domain, and it was very difficult to get the content indexed and when I did get enough content and links to the site, I probably could have invested the same amount of time on just getting links to the property I wanted ranked in the first place.

The links never moved the needle, the site never ranked, and I eventually turned the keys back over to the school to run the blog themselves.

Do you have another story of a failed link building experiment? If so, ping me at jcooper at pointblankseo d-o-t com, and if it meets our editorial standards, I’ll add it to the post along with a company name / link!

The rest of this post will contain documentation on what it does & how to use it.

This is only the initial version, and I already have a list of additional improvements that I will be making, which are listed at the end of this post.

Before going any further, I want to give a HUGE shout out to Paul Livingstone & Check My Links, the extension this was built off of. Under the MIT License, he’s allowed anyone to improve upon the original extension, which is what we’ve done.

Why This Extension Is Noteworthy

Checking a page for broken links on-the-go is not new. The first to make it practical & efficient was Check My Links, an extension that my agency has used heavily up until this point. It’s simple: click a button, and see which links are broken, just like the below.

What it’s missing is what we do next. We want to take this link and find out more about it, which you can now do in one click with LinkMiner, as shown below.

You can also display link data on the page itself, right next to the status code of the link, as shown below.

You can even export all of that information about those links as a CSV, instantly.

There are a few other features, and there are far more improvements to come, but this extension will take your page link analysis to the next level. With that said, let’s get into the details!

Documentation

Before we get into anything, let’s first get setup.

Setup

First, visit the following link in the Chrome Store to add the extension to your browser:

Once added, you will now be able to locate it on your Extensions page, as shown below.

Before clicking on the ‘Options’ link and playing around with the settings, let’s first run the extension on a test page to authenticate Ahrefs, which is what the link data is being pulled from. If you don’t have an Ahrefs account, then you will be unable to use some of the main additional features. You can sign up for an account here.

Note: we plan on integrating this with Majestic in the future as well (so you can choose), given we don’t run into any development roadblocks.

Then hit the extension’s icon, which should now be showing up in your extension’s list, as shown below.

Ignore the number in red for now; simply click on the icon, and the page will start to be checked for broken links, like the below.

As you can see, it scans the page & checks if any links are no longer working, and if they aren’t, they’ll be highlighted in red. If it’s a 404, it’s in dark red. If it’s any other status code, it’s in light red (as they can be hit or miss in terms of whether they’re actually broken).

Next, click on the status code that is displayed next to the broken link, which will trigger a popup, as shown below.

Next, click ‘Authorize’, and you will be taken to Ahrefs.com to login & allow the extension to authenticate, as shown below.

Once you authenticate, you will be given this dummy message. You’ll then return to the page you were checking to see if it’s now working.

Going back to the page, click on the status code again, and you’ll now see working data in the extension.

From here, let’s now talk about the Options/Settings that allow you to unlock additional features with a few clicks.

Options

You can locate the Options page in two ways: via the gear icon on the graphic that shows up when the extension is activated on a page, or via a link on the extension’s listing on your browser’s Extensions page. Both are shown below.

Once clicked, you will be shown the following page.

Let’s run through what each option is asking:

Status code. Display the status code next to working links, so you can also view more data on those links too.

Ahrefs metrics. Display Ahrefs link data on the page next to each link as you would with the status code. You can display Backlinks, Referring Domains, or both. You can also only ask the extension to generate this data if it’s an external link.

Caution: this can eat up a lot of your OpenApp API calls, so be cautious!

Top links. Display the top 5 links to a given URL you’re investigating at the bottom of the popup window, below the link & social data that is displayed.

Number displayed in front of the extension’s icon. Have the number be either the total links on the page, or just the number of external links.

A few tactical notes about the above features:

Ahrefs metrics. If you enable these, when you export the links from a page (will address later), this data that you’re pulling will be exported with it.

Top Links. Next to the URL & page title of the top 5 links is the Ahrefs Rank metric. This is only used to figure out which 5 we should be pulling (the 5 highest); personally, I don’t find this metric valuable for anything else other than this feature.

Number displayed on icon. If you select ‘External Links’, you can quickly tell if the page you’re viewing links out, which is handy for quickly assessing link opportunities, regardless if you’re checking it for broken links.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about a few things you’ll notice when using the extension.

Additional Features

Here is a list of the additional features that aren’t addressed on the Options page:

Exporting. You can export the list of links on the page, as well as their status codes, whether they’re internal or external, and they’re Ahrefs data (if setting is enabled) as a CSV file. To do this, click the icon pointed out below.

Ahrefs View More links. This idea isn’t original; we stole it from ShareMetric (highly recommend). You can quickly view more information on different aspects of that URL/Domain, courtesy of the dashboard on Ahrefs.com, which you’d have an account on if you got this far.

With that said, let’s see if I can answer as many of your questions in the below list of FAQs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Your worst nightmare came true and somehow it’s not working for everyone. Which brand of pitchfork would you recommend? If this actually happens despite all my testing, then I promise I’ll be working through it non-stop until it’s solved.

Why does this permissions popup make me so uncomfortable? Trust me, I’m with you on this one. This just seems to be permissions needed by my developer to make the extension work properly. Turns out, all extensions ask for permissions like these.

Where are you getting the core functionality? We’re using the same code that was used to make Check My Links. We’ll be further improving on this code in future updates to prevent false positives & improve detection of pages that should be marked as broken.

Why does it only integrate through Ahrefs? We simply just haven’t gotten to Majestic yet, and we plan to seriously look into it for version 2.0. We are aware that Open Site Explorer might be worth including as well, but I can’t promise we’ll get to it.

What are my Ahrefs API credit limitations? As of this writing, here are the limits for each plan:

Lite – 50k rows

Standard – 300k rows

Plus – 1M rows

Premium – 5M rows

Please double check this with the source. In terms of what those numbers mean to you:

1 row for each link checked when displaying Ahrefs metrics on the page itself

2 rows for each link that you investigate by clicking its status code

Therefore, if you’re looking to display Ahrefs metrics on the page itself, note the number in red on your icon in case you happened to be on a page that was absolutely loaded with links, as it would eat up a lot of API calls.

What exactly are those numbers being pulled from Ahrefs? We’re looking at links to the URL (not the domain or prefix).

The data on the popup window is loading slowly. Therefore, your extension must be broken. I guess it’s not a question, but if this happens on occasion, give it time. I’m still not completely sure whose fault this is when it happens (on your side, Ahrefs side, or our side), and if it’s fixable, but if it is, we’ll get to it in future updates.

So I bet you’ll charge for this in the future, right? Nope. I have no reason to. This is more so for the (gobs?) of free PR all you guys will hopefully give us. The only thing I foresee being paid is if we integrate with other services that are paid. So i.e. you might need to pay for them (like Ahrefs) in order to use those additional features.

Are you open to feedback? VERY. You’d be a massive help simply by letting me know any bugs or any feature requests you have. I’d pay you in links if I could.

List of Feature Requests

To hold myself accountable, I’m going to list feature requests right here on the post, and I’ll even throw in a shout out to who ever gave it (if it’s serious enough to be considered; i.e. not: “Make it play Friday by Rebecca Black whenever I click the button”).

So here’s the list I’ve already put together myself:

Be able to prevent false positives (issue duplicated from Check My Links)

Be able to detect if URL is on parked domain (should be flagged)

Be able to detect if URL is on domain with malware (should be flagged)

Integrate with Majestic and/or Open Site Explorer

Allow you to view social data without having to integrate with Ahrefs

Allow you to view social data on page-load, just like you can with Ahrefs metrics

Allow you to export only external links

When calculating the number of external links to show in front of the icon, don’t count links to a certain set of domains (i.e. facebook.com, twitter.com, etc.) so you don’t get thrown off by social profile links for assessing if they link out.

Show # of external/internal links next to each Google search result

Option to display domain or prefix (not URL) level metrics

Add a ‘View More’ link to the Wayback Machine

I can’t promise I’ll add all of the above, but I’ll be looking into the possibility of each.

With that said, here are the feature requests & bugs found from you guys. You can send me feature requests via the Comments on this post, or by tweeting at me @PointBlankSEO.

Ability to automatically scan page for broken links and display a red notification on top if there is one present. (via @anthonydnelson)

An option to only check external links (via Baptiste Place)

The icon in Chrome can be a bit slow to respond (via Alex H)

301s are showing as 405 or 408 Status Codes in the export

Allow authorization of Ahrefs on the Settings page as well (confuses new users who don’t read this guide) (via Patrick Hathaway)

Add the source URL & info at the top of each export (via Patrick Hathaway)

Let us know exactly what those permissions are for & be able for them to be verified (via Darren Shaw)

Make a version for Firefox (via Matthew)

Make a color blind-friendly version (via Jordan)

Regardless, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, whether you think the extension is cool or if your opinion is just flat out wrong (just kidding!). Overall though, the more critical you are, the better!

]]>http://pointblankseo.com/linkminer/feed38What Link Building Tactic Is Going To Get Flamed Out Next?http://pointblankseo.com/whats-next
http://pointblankseo.com/whats-next#commentsTue, 27 Jan 2015 21:26:19 +0000http://pointblankseo.com/?p=2707Find the original post on Point Blank SEO at: %%PostLink%%

The cool thing about being in the position I am as a blogger who writes about link building is that I get to hear from a lot of people and hear what they’re currently doing to build links.

The current time period is no different from any other in the 5 years I’ve been doing this. There’s one tactic that’s getting used & abused by a lot right now, and eventually, it’s going to get ...

The cool thing about being in the position I am as a blogger who writes about link building is that I get to hear from a lot of people and hear what they’re currently doing to build links.

The current time period is no different from any other in the 5 years I’ve been doing this. There’s one tactic that’s getting used & abused by a lot right now, and eventually, it’s going to get dinged or devalued in the near future. In other news, the sky is blue.

Today’s tactic that’s in the spotlight: scholarships. Of course, they’ve been around for a while. They’re nothing new. But guest blogging wasn’t new when it got out of hand from 2012-2014, so this shouldn’t surprise you.

The cool thing is, this one is going to flame out QUICK. The reason being is that these opportunities are shared by the Web as a whole. Sure, you’ve got some saying things like:

There are some niche specific opportunities in certain verticals that others can’t qualify for

They’re still editorially reviewed by web editors / university personnel

Schools will always want to offer their students information on scholarship opportunities

They’re not “bad” links in the eyes of the big G

But of course, it has its downfalls:

Schools will finally be aware of the SEO value, and offer to inform their students by other means (i.e. by newsletter) besides obscure deep pages that they probably don’t even find.

Schools will become wary of web-based scholarships, as more & more sleazy marketers will create legitimate-looking landing pages, but fail to actually pay them out.

They might not be toxic to Google, but they’re certainly not endorsements worth counting. It’s already been widely observed that these links are being devalued to an extent, but they’ll continue in this direction.

So, we’ll be left back at the drawing board, stuck twiddling our thumbs and waiting for bloggers to publish the next big thing that scales to infinity and is easy to do.

But the posts won’t come.

I really do think that this time, we’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel. I get asked numerous times a week about which tactics we should be doing, and I just don’t have the kind of answer that they’re looking for. That’s because everyone is still looking for something brand new to reshape our entire perspective on what it means to build links. And that thinking is exactly what’s lead us to this point.

If you think like this, scanning every “entire list of tactics” post that gets published, then do yourself a favor and put yourself on the right side of fate by stopping and thinking about the tactics you already know.

So I see two options for those who refuse to play the role of the fox once the barrel runs dry and have to do actual work.

1. Do the stuff that takes effort & is as close to a sure-fire thing for the long-term.

The kinds of things I’m talking about here are:

What Matthew Barby writes about here. It might sound simple, but it takes effort to craft a value proposition that gets found in the midst of a ton of pitches by PR (not SEO) professionals.

The kind of content that agencies like BuiltVisible creates that’s used to get seeded on large publications.

The best thing about aiming for these kinds of opportunities is that you instantly weed out 80-90% of the industry who isn’t willing to put in the level of work needed to achieve these links, and never will put in this level of work.

2. Do the “Ghosts of Link Tactics Past” better & more effective than anyone else.

Remember the tactics from a few years back that were used, abused, and then thrown into a ditch in search of more victims?

Well, I haven’t forgotten about them.

What’s left of them are tactics that needed to be executed at a much higher level than before in order to yield the same results. I’m talking about things like guest blogging, links pages, product reviews, general link requests, and even submissions.

Once the barrel runs dry, this is inevitably what people will come back to, and only those that are able to do them exceptionally effectively will continue as link builders, simply because poor execution here will yield no results (or even negative) on a much more frequent basis than ever before.

Currently, this is where my agency lies. We do tactics that won’t surprise you. No, we don’t do anything under number 1, but that doesn’t mean we don’t build links that we believe will stand the test of time.

For example, there are numerous university websites looking to refer new students & faculty to local housing resources.

There are numerous blogs that do want external contributors. Our agency even shares an office with a college town blog network (not the bad kind, the kind that the term was originally coined for) that’s always looking for unique local contributions on what to do, what to eat, and where to go in their cities. And these are blogs that have great readership and social traction.

And that’s just scraping the surface of legitimate link opportunities that are still out there to be acquired by relatively traditional means. The difference is, those that are going to continue to survive & thrive are those that:

Maximize up-front opportunity with deeper prospecting & analysis

Are willing to spend the time to manually find the correct person to contact at a given website or organization

Create unique value propositions with their outreach that triggers responses from people with flooded inboxes

And those aren’t things that are seen in the normal member of this industry. The average SEO:

Uses all-in-one SEO suites that leave a lot of prospects on the table

Uses automation tools to find contact information

Uses the outreach template examples in blog posts read by 1000s of other SEOs (and inevitably used by a lot of them)

Decides on a template and sticks with it for the foreseeable future

Uses the same tools that every SEO is using

And at the end of the day, what’ll happen is that these average SEOs will proclaim link building is dead, and you can no longer do things like you could “in the good old days”.

Meanwhile, the few that are willing to put in the work even just using the low hanging fruit mentioned in this section will continue to succeed and will hopefully keep to themselves (and some of you will yell “hypocrite!” at your screen as you read that) as the mediocrity starts to wind down.

So I ask you:

Why are you still looking for the next big thing? Why aren’t you trying to get ahead of your competition by stopping this kind of thinking, and start planning to do more effective and/or stop taking shortcuts?

As link tactics continue to get flamed, can you really do this practice at a high level while you also offer local SEO, CRO, web design, and whatever the hell else? If you can’t, then you need to rethink what your service offering should include or not include.

Those are two questions that I hope a lot of SEOs & agencies in this space can start to think about if they haven’t already.

What do you think? Would love to hear from you either in the comments or on Twitter (find me: @pointblankseo). As always, thanks for reading, and stay tuned this year for a few interesting things in the works for Point Blank SEO!

If you’ve built links before, then you know about the inevitable brick wall that you hit once you’ve run out of link prospects.

One of the two main ways of finding prospects, backlink analysis, yields some really low hanging fruit, because you’re finding pages that you already know are linking to the same / similar thing as you. But the well runs dry far too quickly.

If you’ve built links before, then you know about the inevitable brick wall that you hit once you’ve run out of link prospects.

One of the two main ways of finding prospects, backlink analysis, yields some really low hanging fruit, because you’re finding pages that you already know are linking to the same / similar thing as you. But the well runs dry far too quickly.

However, a spark lit in my head recently that completely changes how I look at this part of prospecting; not in a way of improving what I’m already doing, but instead, being able to do more of it.

The Concept

The reason you look at your competitors first when prospecting for pages is because you already know they link to someone who does the same thing. That same reason is why most of us don’t look at broader industry resources, just because if they link to them, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll link to you.

But what if you knew that a page linked to two general resources, that are equally distant in relevance that you are to them? That would mean their scope of relevance would allow for you to also qualify for that page.

So let’s give an example. Let’s say you were a niche eCommerce retailer that sold truck parts. You might come across other retailers that sell Jeep parts, but if you look at all their links, there’s a good chance that a lot of them might be linking to them because they’re Jeep-specific.

But you also come across those who sell SUV parts, and you run into the same issue. Sure, you could look through ALL their links, but what if you wanted to more quickly find the ones that you know have a high chance of linking to you? Or what if you wanted to do this with sites that have MUCH more links than a few niche eCommerce retailers?

Here’s what you’d do:

Find all the links to all retailers who are specific to Jeep parts. Combine them into a single spreadsheet, and remove duplicates.

Find all the links to all retailers who are specific to SUV parts. Also combine them into a single spreadsheet, and remove duplicates.

Use a COUNTIF formula in Excel to see if any of the Linking From pages are found in BOTH ranges (meaning: they link to both a SUV & a Jeep parts retailer).

What you find is that these will be much more likely to link, because you know they’re not linking specifically for SUV, or specifically for Jeep parts on that page.

But even if they’re not already mentioning anything Truck parts-related, there’s a good chance that they’d be open to it given the scope of relevance of what they’re currently linking to.

Taking It Further

The above was just a simple illustration, and chances are, you may want to look through all their links anyways, given how closely related those sites are to you. But in much more broader cases, this becomes a practical way of finding tons of new opportunities, especially ones that your competitors don’t find.

Just think broader. Go up & up the hierarchy that your site falls in, and do this with sub-niches that are equally distant in relevance. No, these pages won’t be super-relevant to your business, but using link metrics you can easily sort out the ones that are still going to have a huge impact.

Did that make any sense?

I hope it did. This isn’t a typical post here, just because I usually like to lean on longer, more in-depth pieces, but I thought this concept was worth highlighting for the more advanced crowd.

Thoughts are appreciated in the comments below! I’m traveling this weekend for a conference, so I may or may not get back right away, but I almost always do eventually. Thanks for reading!

Have you ever been so excited about something that you’ve had to consistently discipline yourself to keep from ruining the surprise?

Over the last 6+ months, I’ve been working on something specific to those who are building links for eCommerce websites, as I know the unique challenge these companies produce on the link building side of things. And it’s finally open to the world.

Have you ever been so excited about something that you’ve had to consistently discipline yourself to keep from ruining the surprise?

Over the last 6+ months, I’ve been working on something specific to those who are building links for eCommerce websites, as I know the unique challenge these companies produce on the link building side of things. And it’s finally open to the world.

The guide is now live to the general public right here: http://ecommerce.pointblankseo.com/ (limited to 500 total signups; registration will not be opened again in order to protect the longevity of the information).

(If you’re reading this after 9/16/14, it’s no longer available.)

As a link building consultant, I’ve had the chance to work with a handful of eCommerce companies in building out a link building strategy & executing on it, and I realized that there was very little information of this regard currently on the Web. I wanted to change that, and then some.

I’m also hosting a private webinar for all members to show how I’m currently building links to an existing eCommerce website. On top of that is a huge open forum for Q&A on anything eCommerce link building related.